deuce-ish: I was a firm believer in the newspaper business until 2020. My first job

was as a carrier for the Des Moines Register. I kept a physical and virtual subscription to WSJ until the end of December 2020 and had a virtual sub to the local Greenville paper that is an amalgamated Gannett rag.

In 2020 it became abundantly clear that the newspaper business as a whole had entirely abandoned any semblance of asking and answering for us "who, what, when, where, why, and how" and became nothing other than a regurgitation machine for the Master Narrative.

The year started off shaky with newspapers failing to inquire about the veracity of the 3.4% IFR that the Chinese and WHO claimed COVID carried. That high IFR was a fundamental basis for the draconian measures adopted across the world. In a world of short form hot takes, the newspaper should have been the source of long form analysis. "Is it really possible that China only had 88,000 cases of COVID? What happens to the IFR model if they are off by a factor of 5? A factor of 10?"

By the middle of the year we got the Summer of Love. The Associated Press demanded the Black be capitalized. The newspapers again provided no pushback to the Master Narrative. The police are simply racist, you see.

And then, in November of 2020 we were handed literally the most interesting investigative journalism story ever imagined. There was copious evidence that led to reasonable questions about the veracity of the election results in certain jurisdictions. There were multi-day hearings and hours and hours of eye witness testimony. Did any of the newspapers use their resources to investigate anything? Of course not, they would provide a perfunctory story and throw around the word "debunked."

The Wall Street Journal was a bastion of investigative reporting. Whilst every other media outlet was fawning over the GurlBoss du jour, Elizabeth Holmes, the WSJ ran with a story questioning if she was a fraud. They were threatened heavily by Boies Shiller. Did they back down? No. They conducted actual investigative reporting and published their findings. Holmes is now in federal prison.

2020 was the year where the newspaper business made the conscious decision that it was no longer going to conduct investigative reporting. The newspaper became nothing more than an amalgamation of the wire services and there is absolutely nothing warranting the payment to them of a premium price for licensing the same Master Narrative shit content as everyone else. There is simply no compelling reason to subscribe anymore. I do not believe that any newspaper will ever conduct investigative reporting like the Mirage Tavern story the Sun Times did and without investigative reporting there is simply no reason for the newspaper to exist. Patch and Reddit cover general interest local stories for free.

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I may be the only subscriber on this board. We even get the print and digital. When Jeff Bezos bought the paper, it was on the rocks. It revived for a while during Trump's first term with all that news.

The paper continues to shrink and decline, and today the Post announced major cuts (maybe 30%). I don't want more national news and politics. That stuff is everywhere.

From the NY Times:

The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, told newsroom employees on a call that all sections would be affected in some way. But he said that the end result would be a publication that focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.

Mr. Murray said the sports section would close, though some of its reporters would stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports.

Mr. Murray added that The Post’s metro section would shrink. The books section will close....

“The actions we are taking include a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” Mr. Murray said. The company is also making broad cuts on the business side.

He said the company had lost too much money for too long, and had not been meeting readers’ needs....

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Mr. Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions....

At the end of 2024, Mr. Bezos described the struggle in an interview at a conference hosted by The New York Times: “We saved The Washington Post once, and we’re going to save it a second time.”

In a staff meeting in 2024, Mr. Lewis warned that The Post was in trouble. “We are losing large amounts of money,” he said. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”

The Post is far from alone among publishers in its struggles to achieve profitability. For many outlets, print circulation has continued to nosedive, digital traffic has been hampered by generative A.I. and audiences have splintered to various social media platforms. Publishers have had to experiment with different revenue streams, such as events and premium memberships, to offset losses.