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Not so long ago – it’s been less than a decade – the New York Times and the Washington Post were almost neck and neck in the race for readers, reputation and scoops. The Times was always bigger, but the two were somewhat comparable.
These days, that’s far from reality. The Post has been declining in influence, newsroom staff and financial health – losing at least $100m a year – while the Times is on an astonishing upward trajectory, with operating profit approaching $200m annually.
The Times boasts about 13 million digital subscribers compared to the Post’s roughly 2 million. It now has newsroom staff around the world of well over 2,000, while the Post has slipped to only 400, after reaching a height of more than 1,000.
There’s no question now of who won the war.
Why this dramatic difference?
I was the Times public editor until 2016, at a moment when consumer-related revenue (especially online subscriptions) became dominant over traditional print-advertising revenue. That was a major milestone on the march to digital success. Then, I was the Post’s media columnist throughout the entire first Trump administration, including during years of encouraging growth and success.
So, I’ve seen it all unfold before my eyes. The difference certainly wasn’t about journalistic talent. For decades, both newsrooms have been stuffed to the brim with it, winning Pulitzer Prizes aplenty and hiring great reporters and editors.
No, it all came down to leadership.
At the Times, a publicly traded company, leadership has been steady, predictable and savvy – always with an eye to the future.
As one example, more than a dozen years ago, the soon-to-be publisher, AG Sulzberger, was a driving force behind the “innovation report” that pushed to put the company’s energy into making a radical transition from a newspaper to a digital news company. The report chastised the paper for being behind its competitors on those metrics.
His father, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, before turning over the reins, hired or promoted people like former BBC honcho Mark Thompson and Meredith Kopit Levien (now CEO), who made smart business decisions while recognizing the primacy of Times journalism.
And in the Times newsroom, a steady progression of well-known insiders has prevailed. Newsroom leadership is groomed internally; that practice can foster insularity and self-importance, but it also creates stability.
Washington Post history tells a far different story. The paper – famous for its Watergate reporting that exposed a corrupt president – was struggling financially under Graham family ownership in the early 21st century. As print advertising waned, the paper appeared uncertain of whether it was mostly a regional outlet serving the District of Columbia and its suburbs, or a national paper with global ambitions.
When Jeff Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur, bought the paper in 2013, it looked like salvation had arrived.
Marty Baron, a strong and visionary editor, was already in place, and during his eight-year era, the paper thrived. Forceful journalism held Trump accountable, and both the business side and the newsroom focused on growth and innovation.
The publisher, Fred Ryan, nominally Baron’s boss, was mostly benign. And Bezos stayed in the background but admirably didn’t buckle under Trump’s threats and disparagement.
When Baron retired in 2021 – succeeded by a much weaker Sally Buzbee, whose background was almost entirely at the Associated Press – and when Bezos later replaced Ryan with the execrable Will Lewis, the wheels came off.
All the gains the Post had made – growth in digital subscriptions, and even a couple of years of profitability – began to dissipate.
Lewis never connected with the journalists, and his ideas (the creation of a “third newsroom”, whatever that might have meant) did real harm.
In one telling moment in early 2022, a great Post reporter, David Fahrenthold, left to join the Times. It was a bad omen.
And then, something even worse happened. Shortly before the 2024 election, Bezos started to cozy up to Trump. In a now infamous move, he killed a planned editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, on the purported grounds that endorsement editorials create distrust.
Whatever the political leanings of the Post’s readers – they certainly aren’t all liberals – they knew what they were seeing: the loss of editorial independence by an owner more concerned about his commercial interests – not only Amazon but his space company, Blue Origin – than about the storied news organization he was supposed to be stewarding.
In protest, about 200,000 Post loyalists canceled their subscriptions. More would follow.
Bezos not only failed to address the mess he had made, but he also doubled down by revamping the opinion section and continuing to suck up to Trump.
Now after deep layoffs and the overdue firing of Lewis, the Post’s fortunes are troubled, to say the least.
“We’re witnessing a murder,” wrote Ashley Parker, a former Post politics reporter now at the Atlantic.
If leadership caused this vast separation in fortunes, only enlightened and effective leadership at the Post can begin to close the gap.
As someone who has revered the Washington Post for decades, I wish I could see that on the horizon. But I can’t catch even a glimpse.
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Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
