Will The Washington Post become ‘a corporate libertarian mouthpiece’? Plus, media notes.

It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.

Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.

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So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:

If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.

Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.

As I wrote in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” Shel Kaphlan, Bezos’ very first employee at Amazon, who later had a falling-out with him, was quoted in a Post interview as saying that was exactly what he feared. I wrote:

Shel Kaphlan, Bezos’s first employee, who left Amazon after his role within the company was marginalized, was quoted as saying, “I saw him just completely destroy people on several occasions.” Kaphlan added that he felt “nauseous” at the prospect of Bezos owning the Post and the possibility that he would convert it “into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”

It didn’t happen. In addition to leaving the news pages alone, Bezos also allowed opinion editor Fred Hiatt to continue with an approach I described at the time as “moderately liberal with a taste for foreign intervention.” That continued under Shipley, who came on board after Hiatt died in late 2021.

Now Shipley’s gone, and Marty Baron, the former executive editor who ran the news section to great acclaim, is ripping Bezos in The Atlantic, writing that Bezos — after years of stalwart leadership — has, at long last, jettisoned the legacy of his most celebrated predecessor (gift link):

Now we know that Bezos is no Katharine Graham. It has been sad and unnerving to watch Bezos fall so terribly short of her standard as he confronts the return of Donald Trump to the White House. It’s been infuriating to observe the damage he has inflicted in recent months on the reputation of a newspaper whose investigative reporting has served as a bulwark against Trump’s most transgressive impulses.

David Folkenflik reports for NPR that the Post lost 75,000 subscribers after Bezos’ announcement last week. That’s on top of the 250,000 who canceled following the Harris endorsement debacle. I haven’t seen any numbers for the Post’s current circulation, and in fact Folkenflik reports that the Post actually added some 400,000 subscriptions recently, mainly by offering massive discounts.

Meanwhile, we all wait to see how the Post’s opinion section will change — and, more important, if Bezos fecklessness will start to bleed over into the news coverage, which so far has remained strong and independent.

Media notes

• A new nonprofit chain. Newswell, a new nonprofit organization based at Arizona State University, has acquired three news organizations in danger of going under and has ambitions to build what would essentially be a nonprofit chain. Sophie Culpepper, who writes about local news for Nieman Lab, reports that Newswell is being funded with a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Culpepper notes that Newswell’s goal of both owning and operating the outlets it acquires is reminiscent of the National Trust for Local News, which owns some 60 papers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia, and has run into problems recently. Let’s hope Newswell executive director Nicole Carroll can learn from the Trust’s mistakes.

• Downsizing in Maine. Speaking of the National Trust, Aidan Ryan reports in the Globe that long-anticipated cuts have finally been announced at the Portland Press Herald and other papers that are owned by a National Trust affiliate, the Maine Trust for Local News. “No reporters will be laid off, as the job cuts are focused on print production, circulation and advertising,” writes Ryan, who says that 49 people will lose their jobs as the group cuts back on print in favor of digital. I hate to see anyone lose their jobs, but I hope this is a step toward sustainability.

• Still more from Maine. Reade Brower, the publisher who sold the Press Herald and its affiliated newspapers to the National Trust in 2023, is attracting a lot of attention with his latest venture, the Midcoast Villager, which he owns along with his business partner, Kathleen Fluery Capetta. Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University offers a status report on the project, which combined four smaller papers without laying anyone off. Among other things, the Villager has opened a café in the town of Camden and is using artificial intelligence to summarize governmental meetings — an unfortunate choice, perhaps, but one that is driven by the challenge of covering 43 communities.

“The cafe is a place where not only do we get to host our own events and it’s a great meeting place, but we see it as integral to what we’re trying to do in terms of building community,” publisher Aaron Britt told Caro. “We feel like a physical embodiment of the paper is a really interesting and important way to exist, like a community member.”