Take, for a recent example, The Washington Post. Vince Morris of Washington City Paper reported last week that Metro, Sports and Style are going to be merged into one print section on most days, depriving residents of the DC area of a standalone section comprising local news. Morris called the announcement “grim,” even though he noted that executive editor Matt Murray said in a memo to readers that the move will not mean less coverage. Morris also writes:
According to data provided to City Paper by the Alliance for Audited Media, the Post’s paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays. That’s a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation.
Piling on is Andy Meek of Forbes, who writes of those print numbers: “To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.”
Now, it’s true that paid print has held up much better at The New York Times (244,000 on weekdays, 606,000 on Sundays) and The Wall Street Journal (449,000 on weekdays, 506,000 for its weekend edition). But print has long since ceased to matter. The Times, after all, has 11 million digital-only subscribers and the Journal has around 4 million.
And therein lies the true crisis for The Washington Post.
As Morris writes, the Post stopped reporting its paid digital circulation some time ago. Last fall, when owner Jeff Bezos began taking a wrecking ball to the paper’s opinion section by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election, paid digital was thought to be around 2.5 million. About 200,000 vanished overnight. And who knows what it is today after further damage caused by high-profile resignations such as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and Bezos’ announcement that he planned to transform the opinion pages into some sort of cheerleading free-market hellhole.
Bezos’ ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, has had exactly one good idea since he was hired in late 2023: to start a premium newsletter of local and regional coverage for readers who live in Washington and its suburbs. But if that’s ever been mentioned again, word of it somehow escaped me.
The Washington Post is in deep, deep trouble. After 10 years of sterling sterling stewardship, Bezos has transformed himself into the owner from hell, damaging the reputation of a still-great news organization that he did so much to build up.
Evidence of the destruction is all around. But you won’t find it in the paper’s irrelevant print circulation numbers.
It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.
We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.
Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.
Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.
1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”
Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.
Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.
She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”
2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.
“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.
Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.
3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.
“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”
As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
I was hoping that Jeff Bezos had gotten it out of his system. After his disastrous decision to cancel The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, which cost the paper some 250,000 subscriptions, and his subsequent sucking up to Donald Trump, the billionaire had been quiet recently.
The news section’s coverage of the calamitous Trump White House has been excellent, and the Post’sdeputy managing editor, Mike Semel, has said that subscriber conversions “are strong and growing at a near-record pace,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.
But it was too good to be true. New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin reports (gift link) that opinion editor David Shipley is quitting after Bezos issued an edict calling for the section to go full MAGA. No longer will the Post offer a heterodox opinion section of liberals, moderates and conservatives. Rather, it will be more like The Wall Street Journal’s ultraconservative opinion section, only (I’ll predict) not as smart. Mullin writes:
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, in an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Mr. Bezos wrote.
You can read the full text of Bezos’ message on Mullin’s Bluesky feed.
Shipley had to endure the embarrassment of the Harris non-endorsement and then took one for the team when he killed an Ann Telnaes cartoon mocking Bezos and other corporate titans as they groveled at Trump’s feet. Shipley’s reasoning at the time — that there had already been enough of such opinionating — was disingenuous, and Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit. But Shipley is standing tall today.
I have to assume this will set off a mass exodus from the Post’s opinion section. Good thing that Jonathan Capehart survived the purge at MSNBC that claimed Joy Reid.
A few random observations:
• Bezos says, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Hmmm … personal liberties and free markets? If Bezos is serious, then that would mean the new Post opinion section will be deeply anti-Trump: opposed to tariffs and in favor of reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But of course that’s not what he means. He’s adopting the up-is-down rhetoric of the MAGA movement.
• Bezos explicitly rejects the idea of a heterodox opinion section, arguing that it’s not necessary because “the internet does that job.” For years, the Post’s opinion section has been center-right, with a few liberals and a few Trumpers. Now The New York Times stands alone of the three major national papers in offering something close to the full spectrum. It’s kind of the mirror image of what the Post had been up until now — that is, the Times has been center-left, with a few conservatives but no Trump supporters.
• Does Bezos want the Post’s news pages to continue as tough, fair, independent truth-seekers with no interference from the owner? That’s how it works at the Journal, whose news pages continue to kick butt despite the right-wing opinion section and despite Murdoch ownership. Bezos was a very good steward of the Post from the time he bought it in 2013 until about a year ago, when he hired Fleet Street veteran and former Murdoch executive Will Lewis as publisher and kept him on even as questions about Lewis’ ethics mounted. I’m hoping for the best from the Post’s news section, but I’m bracing for the worst.
Washington Post publisher Will Lewis. 2019 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The ongoing implosion of The Washington Post is unfolding at a moment when we’ve never been more in need of tough, independent journalism. The latest, as Sara Fischer reports for Axios, is that Phil Rucker is leaving as the Post’s national editor in order to become senior vice president of editorial strategy and news at CNN.
It seems that anyone who can leave the Post is doing so now that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has thrown in with Donald Trump. I don’t blame people for staying; after all, jobs in journalism are hard to come by, and there’s still reason to hope the paper’s news reporters will be allowed to do good work. Still, Bezos has done incalculable harm over the past year following a decade of model ownership; I wrote about the first years of his reign in my 2018 book, “The Return of The Moguls.” What’s happening now is depressing.
Before I get back to the Post, a word about CNN, about which there is reason to worry and reason to be hopeful. On the one hand, you have to be concerned about independent media reporter Oliver Darcy’s story Tuesday evening that chief executive Mark Thompson had told his staff before the inauguration that he wanted them not to dwell on the past. Darcy writes:
The next day, the network executed as directed…. CNN’s journalists entirely avoided pointing out during special inauguration coverage various inconvenient truths, such as the fact Trump is the first convicted felon to take office or that he was impeached for his role in inciting an insurrection on the very place he took his second oath. It was a glaring omission, but not one by accident.
On the other hand, Thompson is the guy who, in his previous job, revived The New York Times’ fortunes, transforming the newspaper into a growing, profitable digital powerhouse not just on the strength of its journalism but through ancillary products such as games, consumer advice and food. And he somehow convinced an outstanding news leader like Rucker that CNN is a better place to be right now than The Washington Post.
About which: As I was getting ready to write this item, the Post’s Karla Adam reported (gift link) that Rupert Murdoch’s British publishing empire had settled an invasion-of-privacy suit brought by Prince Harry for more than $10 million and an apology. Adam writes:
As part of the deal, Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) issued a formal apology, which was read out in court by Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne, conceding “unlawful activities” carried out by private investigators working for Murdoch’s newspapers, including “phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information.”
Scan down further into the story and you’ll come across this:
An executive summary of the claimants’ arguments, shared with The Washington Post before the settlement, indicated that Harry and [Labour Party politician Tom] Watson’s legal teams planned to allege that “over 30 million emails were deliberately destroyed” as part of a scheme to keep evidence from police investigators. The document asserted that “a pivotal role” in directing the email deletions had been played by former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, still a senior executive for Murdoch, and former NGN general manager William Lewis, now publisher and CEO of The Washington Post.
Both Brooks and Lewis have denied allegations of wrongdoing. NGN has acknowledged that emails were removed, but said that was part of a planned system migration and a new data retention policy, and that additional instructions were given to preserve emails potentially relevant to a police investigation.
The problems at the Post may have come to public attention starting with Bezos’ stunning decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris with just days to go before the election. But the downward spiral really began with the appointment of Lewis to replace outgoing publisher Fred Ryan, and with Bezos’ stubborn insistence on sticking with Lewis despite embarrassing revelations about his involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who broke the news about Lewis’ involvement earlier this year, revisited that issue on Tuesday after reports of a settlement were circulating but before it was consummated. Though Folkenflik was careful to note that Lewis was “not a defendant in the case, and has denied all wrongdoing,” he added:
The plaintiffs allege that Lewis and the other executives orchestrated the deletion of millions of emails and withheld other material from police. According to police notes presented in court filings, Lewis told a police investigation they had to delete the emails to head off a scheme by Watson and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to get materials surreptitiously from Brooks’ computer.
Brown and Watson have denied any such plot; News UK has not to date produced any evidence publicly to support its existence. Brown has demanded a criminal investigation from Scotland Yard, which opened a preliminary review to determine whether a full investigation is warranted.
Former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, now a contributor to The Guardian, wrote last Friday that Bezos needs to act quickly in order to save the Post. Her recommendations: hold an on-the-record meeting with the staff; make it clear that “he understands the importance of editorial freedom and pledge not to interfere with it”; and fire Lewis.
I wonder if it might be too late, though Sullivan’s advice would at least represent a dramatic break with the way Bezos has run the Post over the past year. My preference, given his unimaginable wealth, is that donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation and endow it, as the late Gerry Lenfest did with The Philadelphia Inquirer did in 2016.
Clearly, though, Bezos has to do something. Actually, let me revise that: He doesn’t have to do a damn thing. But I’m ever hopeful that he will.
In the latest sign that The Washington Post has lost its way, the paper’s acting executive editor killed a story reporting that managing editor Matea Gold had left to take a job at The New York Times.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Matt Murray intervened and ordered that a story on Gold’s departure be deep-sixed. Now, this is all very complicated. Murray, who was brought in earlier this year by the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, replaced Sally Buzbee after she quit rather than move over to head a “third newsroom” initiative that Lewis has talked about but has not really explained. (Buzbee recently was named to a top editing job at Reuters.)
Murray, in turn, is supposed to run the third newsroom after the Post chooses a new, permanent executive editor — and Gold, a respected insider, was thought to be a candidate for that position. But now Murray himself, who’s proved to be popular inside the newsroom (at least until this week), may want to stay right where he is; independent media reporter Oliver Darcy wonders if Murray killed the story about Gold’s departure in order to curry favor with Lewis. Adding to the intrigue is that Lewis was also Murray’s boss when they both worked at The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading “At The Washington Post, silence is Gold; plus, a bad day for Rupe and Lachlan, and cuts at Stat News”
The problem with good billionaire newspaper owners is that they can turn into bad billionaire newspaper owners, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. This morning I bring you two disturbing data points about owners who had already put us on notice that their days of responsible stewardship were receding into the past.
First up: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has owned The Washington Post since 2013. Now, as I have written here on multiple occasions, Bezos was a sterling owner up until a couple of years ago, providing the legendary paper with money and independence as well as standing up to Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and his first term as president. I wrote admiringly of his ownership in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” and no, I wouldn’t take any of it back.
But Bezos lost his way sometime after Marty Baron retired as executive editor in 2021. Baron’s replacement, longtime Associated Press editor Sally Buzbee, was fine, but Bezos may have been intimidated by Baron into not indulging his worst instincts, and that ended with Baron’s departure.
Bezos’ next move was to hire British tabloid veteran Will Lewis as his publisher and to stick with him even after it was revealed that Lewis’ ethics were so compromised that his behavior has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. Buzbee left rather than accept what looked like a demotion. The current executive editor, Matt Murray, has reportedly won the respect of the newsroom, but he’s supposed to be a temporary hire and is slated to move over to some sort of ill-defined “third newsroom” initiative. Continue reading “Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times”
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos raised eyebrows, and hackles, when he logged on to Twitter/X on Wednesday and posted a congratulatory note to Donald Trump:
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
The tweet immediately angered Trump critics, who were quick to point out that it came shortly after Bezos killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been already written and was ready to go. Bezos claimed that decision was nothing more than a reflection of his belief that the paper should stop endorsing candidates, but the timing was suspicious, to say the least.
It didn’t help that Bezos failed to offer similar congratulations on Twitter to Joe Biden in 2020. One Twitter user, @WhiteHouseAMA, pulled up Bezos’ 2016 congrats to Trump and commented: “Jeff tweeted congratulations to Trump in 2016 and 2024. No tweet exists for Biden in 2020. He didn’t kill the WaPo endorsement of Harris because he wanted to be non-partisan, he did it because he is a partisan.”
But wait.
Writing in Newsweek, Alex Gonzales reported that Bezos did, in fact, congratulate Biden in 2020, except that he did it on Instagram rather than Twitter — and he did so rather fulsomely: “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris. By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.” The message is accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Biden and Harris celebrating.
Newsweek added the Instagram update in a correction, showing how widely it was believed that Bezos had not congratulated Biden four years ago.
The immediate outrage among anti-Trump forces demonstrates the impossible dilemma that Washington Post journalists now face in proving to their audience that they remain independent. Though Bezos was within his rights to cancel the Harris endorsement, it was an unspeakably bad look for him to do so in the final days of the campaign, making it seem like he was truckling under in the event of a Trump victory — which now, of course, has come to pass.
It hasn’t helped that the cancellation followed months of controversy over the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. If Trump is the first convicted felon to be elected president, then surely Lewis is the first Post publisher to be under investigation by Scotland Yard. I continue to trust the independence of the Post’s newsroom, but I’m watching for any signs that I shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on Wednesday to offer his own cheery greetings to Trump, writing, “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Threads is just one of the many platforms Zuckerberg controls; the most prominent are Facebook and Instagram. Threads has also been by far the most successful of the would-be alternatives to Twitter that sprang up after Trump uber-influencer Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, acquired it and started taking a wrecking ball to it in late 2022.
Threads has proved to be especially popular with liberals fleeing the extreme right-wingers and white nationalists whom Musk enabled on Twitter. And yet Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who runs Threads and Instagram, has gone out of his way to play down political news in Threads’ algorithm, leading to frustration and anger among a number of users. Messages have been removed for no reason, too, as Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus has noted.
Even before Zuckerberg’s congratulatory post, some Threads users were leaving and setting up shop on Bluesky, the most prominent short-form platform after Twitter and Threads. Bluesky is owned by a public-benefit corporation and as such is not subject to the whims of a billionaire owner. It also has much better personalization tools than either Twitter or Threads.
Bluesky, though, has only a fraction of the users that its larger rivals have — about 12 million total versus more than 600 million active monthly users at Twitter and 175 million at Threads. Personally, I’m trying to give equal attention to Threads and Bluesky, but it’s hard to know whether Bluesky will ever break through.
After all, it’s a billionaires’ world, and we’re just living in it.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.
Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”
Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.
If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:
This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.
News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.
Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.
Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:
In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.
Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”
Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.
On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.
Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:
I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.
But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.
Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.
Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.
Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.
Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”
Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.
The Sun is shining
A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.
“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”
Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:
The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.
The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.
Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.
The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.
“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”
Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”
I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.
