What audience should a newspaper serve?

This article is prompted by the widespread wailing that has followed the announcement that the Washington Post (the Post) will reduce its staff by about one-third in the first half of 2026. Much of the reaction seems to be written by current or former staff of the Post or by their friends and other newspaper insiders.

There is also a remarkable level of vituperation aimed at the owner – Jeff Bezos, founder and long-time CEO of Amazon – and the paper’s publisher – Will Lewis, who was formerly CEO of the Wall Street Journal. In the case of both individuals, the comments reflect exceedingly harsh views of their competence and motivation that are entirely at odds with their previous records as managers and in the newspaper industry. It is probably best to treat such comments as manifestations of rage at the harsh outcome of Post’s commercial failure.

What is not highlighted is the fact that the Post is reported as having made a loss of between $75 to $100 million on a total revenue of $174 million in 2024-25. It is very likely that the expected loss in 2025-26 would be worse as the newspaper’s weekday print circulation fell from about 130,00 in 2023 to about 97,000 in 2025. The company had about 500 journalists in 2025 with about 1,000 employees. The number of staff was much higher than comparable US city newspapers.

Defenders of traditional newspapers suggest that print circulations don’t matter, as revenue from print subscribers can be replaced by revenue from digital subscribers. While the number of the Post’s digital subscribers is large, it too has fallen from more than 3 million in the early 2020s to below 2.5 million now. Further, digital subscribers generate much lower levels of revenue and advertising than print subscribers.

The decline in the Post’s circulation and revenues has been dramatic. In its annual report for 2000 it reported an average weekday print circulation of 787,000 copies with average sales of over 1,060,000 on Sundays. The Washington Post Group made a pre-tax profit of $230 million in the year 2000, which was a long way down from $668 million in the year 1998. The late-1990s were the high point for the newspaper. Its average revenues from advertising and newspaper sales were close to $2 billion per year in 1999-2000.

By 2011-12 the Post’s revenue had fallen to about $600 million per year. Within The Washington Post Group, newspaper revenues had fallen to less than 15% of total revenues while other businesses including education (Kaplan), cable TV and TV broadcasting accounted for 85% of total revenues. On a segment analysis, newspaper publishing made a loss of over $120 million in 2012.

Looked at in the longer run this is not a story of a sudden and recent decline. The Post was in deep trouble by the beginning of the 2010s, which is why the Graham family sold it to Jeff Bezos for a reported $250 million in 2013. At that point what had been The Washington Post Company was transformed into Graham Holdings focusing on its education and TV businesses.

The reason for the change over the decade from 2001 to 2010 is simple. In the 1990s, when I lived in Washington, the Post was a goldmine, largely because of enormous volumes of local advertising for department stores and other retailers. Circulation was high, not mainly because of readers with interest in national politics but because you read the Post for news about local sport, cultural events, suburban government, etc. If you wanted to know what was happening in Arlington, Virginia or Rockville, Maryland, the Post was your natural port of call. Most of the advertising and circulation disappeared gradually during the 2000s and rapidly in the 2010s. In this respect, the path of the Post was no different from that of many other newspapers based in cities from Boston and Miami to Chicago and St Louis and all down the west coast. That is why so many newspapers are privately owned now.

No-one is surprised that the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times are much smaller than they were 20 or 30 years ago. The only newspapers that have survived that period in relatively robust shape are the Wall Street Journal and, to a lesser extent, the New York Times (NYT). Both cater for national audiences with specific preferences. They are also heavily reliant on their online readerships.

The difference, until now, with the Post was that it had a super-rich and, for a long time, an indulgent owner. The disdain now aimed at Jeff Bezos and his managers is singularly ill-judged. For more than 10 years he has supported an organisation that proved to be incapable of adjusting to a radically different media environment, while retaining its arrogance and sense of entitlement. In his statements he has consistently emphasised that he expected the Post to at least cover its operating costs, even though he did not expect to make a lot of money on his investment. Instead, what he got was a consistent drain on his resources combined with what appears to have been an unwillingness to adjust to the straitened circumstances of the newspaper business.

The only shock about what has happened is that it has come as a shock to the staff of the Post as well as to their friends and allies. To anyone else the necessity of a radical change was obvious. The problem, however, is that the staff of the Post have long lived in a bubble with their only point of reference being the NYT. Well, perhaps, if you are only interested in national politics with a hefty dose of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

While I have no time for much of what the NYT publishes in its main section, the quality of what it publishes on technology, science, healthcare, finance and business, sport and local news is an order of magnitude better than what the Post publishes. You can throw away its front section and still have a lot of journalism that is worth reading.

The wider market is crucial. The print circulation of the NYT has fallen from a weekday average of 1.1 million and a Sunday average of 1.6 million in 2000 to a weekday average of 260,000 and a Sunday average of 1 million in 2023. The fall has not been quite as severe as that for the Post, but Sunday sales are sustained by interest in material other than politics and op-ed articles. Offsetting this decline in print circulation is the growth in digital subscriptions. For the NYT these are nearly 5 times the level for the Post. The market for digital newspaper subscriptions is a “winner take all” business, and the NYT is the winner. Its only serious digital competitor in the US is the Wall Street Journal which offers a very different – and much more expensive – product aimed at businesses.

It is all too easy for journalists sympathetic to their colleagues at the Post to put the blame for the staff reductions on Jeff Bezos’s need to cosy up to President Trump or Will Lewis’s unsympathetic personnel management. Who knows? It is possible that such factors played a small part in the timing of the announcement. However, the Post has been living on borrowed time for nearly a decade and has failed to cut its cloth to reflect its circumstances. As Hemingway wrote, “disaster comes gradually and then catastrophically”. We have reached the catastrophic phase of the hitherto slow-moving disaster for the Post.

Hence, the question in my title: what kind of newspaper can survive in a metropolitan area like Washington? The struggle for national and digital dominance has been won by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Unless they are completely inept that is not going to change. There is an audience, though increasingly limited, for reporting on national politics linked to Congressional business. The Post say that they will retain coverage of foreign news, albeit in a less expensive manner, but I can’t see that this gives it an edge over the NYT. There is, of course, local (or metro) news and sports. The Post used to be obsessed with the Washington Redskins, now the Washington Commanders, but the team’s performance has been dismal for the last two decades. There are major league baseball, ice hockey and basketball teams, but increasingly sports fans get their news from ESPN and other digital channels.

Comparisons with well-established newspapers based in large cities are not encouraging. The LA Times, serving a much larger metropolitan area, reported revenues of about $240 million for 2024 with a loss of about $50 million. It has cut its employee headcount drastically from over 1,000 to about 600 full-time employees in 2025 with only about 200 newsroom reporters. The San Francisco Chronicle, part of Hearst Newspapers, had an estimated revenue of about $70 million and had about 400 employees in 2025. The Chicago Tribune is part of a larger newspaper group that was taken private in 2021, but indicative reports imply that its revenues and number of employees are smaller than the equivalent figures for the LA Times. Finally, the Miami Herald, also part of a larger newspaper group that is privately owned, has annual revenues of about $75 million with about 700 employees.

These newspapers serve metropolitan areas that are either similar in size to Washington (San Francisco and South Florida) or much larger (Chicago and Los Angeles). The comparisons do not suggest that the Post has any realistic prospect of becoming profitable without a major reduction in staff numbers and costs. Clearly that is the logic which lies behind the recent announcement.

There is one outlier. The Boston Globe serves a metropolitan area with a population of about 5 million vs 6.4 million for the Washington metropolitan area. It reports revenues of about $310 million and relies on a model with a high digital subscription charge ($360 per year) and a relatively small number of digital subscriptions (250,000). This is a high-engagement, high-cost model that the Post might seek to imitate. However, Washington is not Boston, no more than it is New York. I have lived, for various amounts of time, in both Boston and Washington. The latter has more transient population and is pretty much a one company town as everything revolves around the federal government. For all that Washington has the veneer of professional sports teams, cultural institutions, universities, hospitals, city and state governments, etc, there is simply not the sense of community which sustains the Boston Globe’s financial model.

Still, surely 2.5 million digital subscribers can support a newspaper of the size of the Boston Globe, if not of the Post’s current size. This is a trap whose effects can be seen in the reactions to Jeff Bezos’s interventions in trying to change the Post. It is likely that no more than 10% of those subscribers are based in the Washington area. The remainder sign up because they are strongly attached to a particular view of the world which they believe the Post represents. Whenever they are disappointed, many threaten to cancel their subscriptions because they can easily move to the NYT or more narrowly focused newsletters. Further, the digital subscriber base is not attractive to advertisers as it is too dispersed and has little in common other than their political inclinations.

The key question is how many digital subscribers to the Post are willing to pay an average subscription of, say, $100 per year – i.e. $10 per month with a discount for an annual subscription. I doubt whether that is close to even 1 million, as the current number relies so heavily on special offers. That would still represent gross revenue of up to $100 million per year.

What would keep such subscribers coming back regularly and paying each year? The Post seems to have lost its local subscriber base. The decision to cut or eliminate its metro and sports desks suggests that the management believes that cannot be reversed. Equally, the evidence suggests that the boost from the highly polarised political environment of President Trump’s first administration did not last long. Are there really 1 million subscribers willing to pay for coverage of national news, the federal government, and Congressional business? Even then, how many of them are already subscribers to high-value newsletters such as those offered by Politico and other online services?

Journalists in the US and their equivalent in the international media take themselves far too seriously. In addition, those working in the unionised newsrooms of city newspapers expect to be well paid. How else can they repay the student loans required to fund the astronomical cost of attending the Columbia Journalism School? The annual cost of a newsroom with 500 journalists is close to $100 million per year including expenses and overheads.

Such costs are far too high for a newspaper with total revenue of less than $200 million per year. Thus, the Post was funded out of Jeff Bezos’s very deep pockets, but this was never likely to last indefinitely. The staff reductions announced last week will reduce but not eliminate the losses being made by the Post. Either more staff reductions will be required, and/or the newspaper must find a way of greatly increasing the revenues generated by its digital subscribers. The transition will be very difficult.

It is far from clear that either the management or the journalists protesting the staff reductions have any strategy that will generate higher revenues and lower costs. So far, the wailing and rending of clothes is little more than a cry against cruel fate. That needs to be put aside to answer the question in my title. I don’t pretend to have an answer. What is obvious is that much of the commentary comes from people who don’t want to address the question. Or, they have an answer and are looking for a rich patron to indulge their fantasies.