The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable.

I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.

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RA_Fisher 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agree, if Bezos hadn’t alienated the readership, they’d probably be doing well.

I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.

	▲	tptacek 37 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
	▲	Applejinx 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!

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panarky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They historically had the best political coverage of DC

And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.

Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?

There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.

	▲	tptacek 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.

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HDThoreaun 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Of those only the journal is a newspaper. The Atlantic is a magazine and economist/politico are focused on a single news sector

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monero-xmr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.