Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: Jeff Bezos is Gutting the Washington Post (w/ Max Tani)

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Sam Stein, JVL, and Semafor's Max Tani react to the Washington Post laying off roughly one-third of its newsroom staff, cutting entire desks, and shutting down major areas of coverage—including foreign bureaus during an active war. They break down what happened, who made the decisions, and why this collapse didn’t have to happen.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stey, managing editor at the Bullwark. I'm joined by Baxthani of Semaphore and JVL, here to talk about the, I don't know how you would describe it. Decimation, murder, bludgeoning of the Washington Post. Happened today, I'm going to give a quick overview of some of the gruesome stats that we know of as of the time of this taping. It's about 1215. One third of Washington Post employees were laid off today. Will Lewis, who, uh, effectively runs the paper, did not attend the meeting when they announced, neither did Jeff Bezos, who owns the paper. The announcements were instead made on a Zoom call at 8.30 a.m. by editor Matt Murray, among the sections that were restructured, which is just corporate speak for eliminated, were the Metro desk, the entirety of the sports department, book section, the canceling of the daily post reports podcast, and a dramatic shrinking of the paper's presence around the world. Every reporter covering the Middle East was laid off.

Jerusalem and Ukraine Bureau chiefs were laid off. There is a war currently in Ukraine still happening. The Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, tweeted, I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone. I have no words, I am devastated. It goes on and on and on from there, but needless to say, it's horrifying. I'm not nostalgic for it because we've been seeing this happening for a while. I'm mad. Like I'm legitimately mad at what happened. We're going to talk about this,

but I want to talk about it in the big picture. And I want to start off with the basically sort of large general question for you, JVL and then for you, Max. Did this have to happen? Why did the post fail? No, this didn't have to happen. Look, it has been a long time since Jeff Bezos had to do something. Right. The guy's worth $250 billion, would it be dollars. He gets to live in a universe in which he is constrained only by his own desires. And so no, this didn't need to happen. The post lost, I think we, I believe, we believe. People suspect it is more than $100 million, probably around like $150 million in 2025.

Jeff Bezos lost when all of a sudden done $60 million last weekend on the Melania documentary. Like, this is not, you know, he spent, he spent $40 million building a clock inside a mountain in Texas. It's going to tell time for 10,000 years. And spoiler, if it stops telling time in 50 years, Jeff Bezos won't. He'll be dead. So, you know, no, this didn't have to happen. This only happened because Jeff Bezos wanted it to, too.

Okay. Max, do you agree? I mean, it's hard to argue with the idea that the one of the richest people in the world, the richest person in the world, you know, depending on the year, couldn't shell out a little bit more to save some of these journalism jobs. Of course, when he joined, that was part of the mission. When he bought the paper, that was part of the mission. He wanted to kind of bring the post into the new era. So, I mean, it's hard to say that it couldn't have been avoided. I mean, there are plenty of caveats here, and I think that there is a lot of blame to go around beyond

just Bezos. I think that there is a lot of blame to go around beyond just Bezos. I think this is the result of years of mismanagement and incompetence and short-term bets and poor planning for rapidly changing media ecosystem, and we can get into that. But of course, as JVL said, Bezos has a lot of money. If he wanted to do something about this, he could have. And of course, one big part of this, and I'm sure we'll get to it, is the fact that Bezos has responsibility because he set the post further down in the spiral by, alienating a very large number of its subscribers in 2024 with the decision not to endorse

Kamala Harris. Yeah. And when I say, you know, Bezos wanted, like, he is the ultimate decider. But like, the button man in all this is the publisher, Will Lewis. And I just think that we should all sort of dispense with the fiction that there's any difference between Will Lewis and Jeff Bezos, because Will Lewis would not be doing anything unless Bezos approved of it. Right.

And so a thing that is happening that Will Lewis. does means that Bezos wanted it to happen. And it's like, I just don't want, I don't want to let Bezos off the hook just because it's his incompetent hatchet man doing the stuff. Max, well, let's chisel us down a little bit. What were the missteps that you think really stood out and caused us to get to this point? I think it should be pointed out that some of this is, and to give them some level of credit here, or at least to set the scene, plenty of this is partially due to environmental factors or environmental factors made it a lot worse, right? I think the Post was riding really high during the first Trump administration by, in part,

covering that administration very aggressively. They gained a large number of subscribers, millions of paying subscribers. And a lot of that changed during the Biden years when there was a major shift in audience attention away from political news that had fueled much that growth. And I think that that set some of the stage for the post's decline. People were just less interested in the post began losing subscribers. The paper didn't really know what to do. It had built itself for growth and it wasn't really prepared for this decline in interest. It did not pivot itself particularly well. The then editor, Sally Busby, kind of tried to get it more into lifestyle coverage, which is just a total kind of mistake. So there were some editorial missteps

that kind of happened along the way. And then, of course, Bezos decided to not endorse Kamala Harris, which alienated a very large portion of its subscriber base that had come under the pretences that the paper believed in this kind of democracy dies in darkness. And, you know, a lot of these people who subscribed felt that the paper was betraying that mission. You know, this slogan was really aimed, particularly at, you know, the crowd of folks were who were not fans of Donald Trump. This is not necessarily a huge surprise. So I think that those things, yeah, right. Those things happen. And it also should be said, it also should be said that this

happened around the same time, too, that Facebook decided to stop sending massive gobs of traffic to news publishers. So all of these things are converging all into one. And it just kind of creates this disastrous scenario. Meanwhile, there's a lot of independent media, people such as the bulwark, the Atlantic, which is not independent, but of course is kind of a smaller organization, which were kind of growing and could absorb some of this audience. Let's talk about that, because there's a couple different elements here, and this is where JVL is going to be great. Because what was the business model of the Post? Was it subscription or was it search or was it a combination?

What was the actual foundations for the Post business? For a long time, it was test prep. Yeah, well, Kaplan, fine. Put aside, Kathleen. No, but I'm serious about this, right? Sure. So you look at these companies and what is the business model of the New York Times right now? The business model of the New York Times is Wordle, right?

It's a mobile gaming platform that publishes a really good newspaper. These things are all choices, right? And as Max said at the very top, the utter incompetence of the leadership making business decisions for the institution of the law. Washington Post has been stunning. So it starts with the purchase of the post in which Bezos didn't take Kaplan. Right. I mean, imagine you are, you are getting into the media business and the first thing you do is on your point of sale, you say, yeah, I don't want to diversify my holdings. I don't need this other thing that's a real business that generates revenue in a predictable recurring way. I just want the media part of it. What the fuck? This is, they, do you remember when

they were going to be a platform vendor, Max. They were standing up their own, their own, you know, CMS. We have a CMS and we're going to be the, we're going to be a CMS tech company that publishes a newsboy. Insane. They spent $5 million on a Super Bowl ad in 2019. What? I forgot about that. I don't remember that one.

Now, listen, again, when you advertise, right, you, you are looking to find the highest concentration possible of your total addressable market. And when you are a newspaper, I can speak from experience here, your total addressable market is actually quite small relative to the world because most people don't read newspapers. And so spending money on,

and it's not even like GoDaddy where you could say, oh, well, they spent the $5 million because they really needed to raise brand awareness. Everybody already fucking knows what the Washington Post is. It's the second-nosed famous media company in America. They spent a ton of resources

going in on Alexa. I don't know if you guys remember this, But they were making all their reporters record voice versions of things because Bezos wanted to listen to it on Alexa. Will Luzus was going to start a third newsroom that wound up, poured resources into this, and then died on launch pad, never even got off the ground. Well, no, hold on. When he said third newsroom, he meant he's cutting a third of the newsroom. So all of what you say. Too soon? I was like, what that.

You have a series of terrible decisions. made by people which, I mean, just look, yes, you had a challenging moment. But I'm sorry. Like, I am in this business as well. And I didn't get fucked by Facebook because I always knew that Facebook could turn off that thing anytime they wanted to. Right. Right.

So there was a line in the Murray memo that stuck out to me where he said, Organic Search has fallen by nearly half. Ah, who could possibly predict it. last three years. And that seems, you know, if your entire business model, or not, I shouldn't say entire, because JVill just outlined the entirety of it, but if a substantial portion of your business model is predicated on people coming to through third-party platforms, you're fucked.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this is, yeah, this is, sorry. Go ahead, Max. I'll stop Philbuss. No, no.

It's okay. It's your, it's you guys' show. but I'm just happy to be here. I think that there's a major shift going on away from the kind of scale that the post was kind of chasing with social traffic and with search traffic as well.

That's a real problem in a kind of fragmented media ecosystem and a fragmented media space. It's hard to reach really, really large numbers of people large enough to sustain a newsroom as big as the post. and I think what the Post needs to do going forward very clearly is figure out who its audience is

and kind of continue to focus on those people and grow those niches. This is something actually, this is why it was such a big mistake for the Post not to endorse Harris because so many of its subscribers were people who wanted to see the paper do that. And it wasn't totally out of the norm either, right? like the post as endorsed Democratic candidates for years and years, particularly, of course, in elections with Trump on the other end. I guess I'm sort of perplexed, and I put this out on Twitter, but it really is confounding to me. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, like he's good for news business. Let's just be very candid about it.

He's good for news business. And to not be able to take advantage of this news climate with a predominantly political news product, is just baffling to me. I don't understand how you can fumble the ball like that. Well, I think that there's two things going on. I think one is what we've already discussed, which is they blew themselves up on the launch pad. The timing, of course, was terrible. They decided to do this right two weeks before Trump was elected. If they decided to do this a year before, they might have given themselves a little bit more runway. That was kind of the first thing. The second thing I do think speaks to a point which might be a little bit, there might be a little bit more

truth, which is the post has taken a slightly more old school approach to its coverage, leaning into articles and the kind of print product. It's allowed itself to be outflanked by a lot of people who either are approaching reporting with fair reporting with a little bit of a point of view. I mean, the folks that you guys have in your newsroom are excellent. Some of them literally from the post. And those people were just on the shelf not being used properly. I think we some we may know who some of those people are. And then also, yeah, yes,

Will, Will, what they, their inability to use Will properly is truly insane. They parked Will Summer in style. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. It was complete misunderstanding of what he was writing about and what he was good at. So that was,

that's, that's also something that's, that falls on kind of the editorial, the editorial staff. And they also allowed themselves to be outflanked by the kind insider Washington publications that have built businesses around this kind of like high level intelligence for decision makers, right? The politicos of the world, the axioses of the world. That's, I mean, partially what semaphore is trying to do. And so I think that they missed the

boat on both of those styles of journalism, which have kind of outflanked them and kind of made the product feel a little stale. It is not the case that everything the post has done editorially has been smart. They have huge organizational problems just in terms of how the, and I, you know, I interviewed, I wrote about this five months ago, I interviewed for a fairly high level position there once. And I mean, just looking at the legacy structures within how the institution, I was like, how the fuck do you guys get anything done here? Like, it's just, you know, too many different lines of communication. The whole org chart needed to be just thrown out and redrawn from the start. So it is not the case like, oh,

they were doing everything perfectly. But on the baseline, were they producing compelling journalism that should have been able to be productized by an intelligent and competent business staff? Like, I think the answer is absolutely yes. And so the primary failing here is management, not editorial. And the extent to which management had no idea how to own the relationship between the audience and the post. and leverage their products, the products would have the most value into long-term relationships.

In fact, they were still chasing Facebook traffic and SEO instead of just going full hog into like audience and subscriptions and recurrent. I mean, because I'm sorry. Like when you are pulling in referral traffic, referral traffic is not meaningful except for serving ads. You know, the referral traffic does not stick around. Those people do not become loyal people.

They're not your real. audience, otherwise they would have discovered you organically. Let me ask you, because we've been talking nuts and bolts, and I think this is valid, makes a compelling case for why they failed. I want to talk sort of spiritual a little bit, and you can slap me down if these seems totally stupid and naive. But there is, and I guess this is just, I'm doing this from the vantage point of someone that works at a publication that is very much community oriented and mission oriented.

But I do think that in the modern media age, to recruit audiences, JVL says, you need to have some sort of understandable, compelling mission to you. And I, you know, post in Trump 1.0 was that. It was like democracy dies in the darkness. We are going to be shedding a light on this, you know, administration in ways that you will be, you know, compelled to buy a subscription. Early days, Politico, very similar. It's like we are going to be hyper competitive at all times in the morning, at the evening. You're going to get you, if you were just obsessed about this stuff, that's us. That's us too. And like you could sort of empathize or sympathize with that, you know, obviously we have our own mission.

And it just seemed like maybe it was in the process of trying to experiment with 15 different ideas and products and, you know, pulling the endorsement. Like, they just didn't, they had good journalism, but I didn't really know what the paper kind of stood for. Yeah. And that's not something you want to necessarily, you're like, oh, I got to be part of that, right? Like, the Atlantic, you know what it stands for. Totally. The Times you know what it stands for. So that, to me, I think, is, it's hard to say, oh, that's why it failed because it's so.

conceptual, but Max, I don't know if that makes sense to you. It's totally, I think that that's totally right. I think that's a really fair point. I think that we've basically seen that with the exception of the New York Times, which still has a, you could argue, has a clear point of view and you kind of know what you're getting most of the time from the New York Times. There aren't that many general interest publications left anymore that kind of stand for very little except for kind of their own existence. I mean, if you go down the list of the publications that are the biggest and most impactful or have the biggest businesses or the largest followings in the U.S. Most of them have a pretty clear point of view.

I mean, Fox, of course, embodies that. The Wall Street Journal embodies that. It's very obvious, you know if you're opening up a Wall Street Journal editorial. Generally, you know the spectrum of opinions you're going to get or the types of stories that you're going to get from the newsroom side. And I do think that the Post did have a very clear identity in Trump 1.0. They were covering Washington aggressively, covering Trump's Washington aggressively. And I think that that's why they leaned into the democracy dies in darkness. That part really worked. I think that they started to stumble when that model really fell apart after Trump exited the stage briefly for an intermission. And they didn't know how to pivot to being a, they tried to pivot to being a broad general

interest publication in the way that the New York Times had done. But the Times had already done that years and years earlier, and they'd done it better and they were bigger. They're in New York. And so I think that they, I think that the Post fumbled this. And this is where the Bezos, this is where the Bezos, a non-endorcement, I think, really, really, really killed them. I mean, the fundamental problem, I think, the Post had was that they couldn't reconcile whether they were a national or a local paper. Right. And, I mean, you look at, you know, they had the sports section, which is now gone. Fantastic sports section.

I think probably the best sports section in America. But it was still a local sports section, right? wasn't, you know, they were covering local stuff. It was you to read about the wizards and the Redskins and the, the capitals and whatnot. And I don't know. They put out, I think it was last year, they're like, we're going to go from 2 million subscribers to 25 million or 200 millions. I don't know what the number would.

But this insane, like, well, hold on. That means you want to be a national or international, like, what are you talking? And then you go and, like, cut all this stuff. and now you're basically, now they're neither. Now they're basically townhall.com. They're, you know,

they're an op-ed section with a handful of great national reporters still there. But no metro, no sports, no international. You're like, so what,

you're, again, it's neither fish nor foul, right? And I, again, all of this blame goes to the people at the top.

And not the product at the Washington Post was the raw product. has always been pretty good and at times excellent and it just I fucking hate it I hate this one of the things I hate so much about capitalism

boo capitalism is that the people who fuck things up actually never pay the consequences Will Lewis isn't going to lose his job which is amazing because this guy has like an unbroken string of failures you look at it you're like hold on he's been there for three years

and all he's done is fuck up over and over and over and over again but he's not laid on that makes no sense to me. Makes me angry. That makes me angry too. Let's close that then with the forward-looking question

because you've now slashed the third of the newsroom. You've closed specific sections. You don't really have international coverage anymore. You have a staff that remains that can't possibly be anything other than completely deflated if not looking for the exits.

They're going to produce some work, but it's hard to imagine how you now write the show which is ironic because, you know, this is ostensibly done to write the ship, right? Well, you notice there's no vision communicated with this stuff. No, zero, zero. There's no like, hey, we know this is all bad, but look, here's the plan. We're going to do X, Y, Z, right?

Here's how we're going to execute. Here's what the audience is. Here's how we're going to rebuild the business. So it just what do you do, Max? Like, it's impossible to me to, like, figure out how to orient it at this juncture. Like, what the hell would you do here? I think it's a really tough challenge. we've seen this with a lot of media companies. This happens with companies in general,

but this particularly happens with media companies where reputation is really important to both the business side in terms of getting people to subscribe or sell ads and also to the editorial side where it makes it easier to recruit if you have people who are excited to be there. It feels like the classic death spiral that we've seen at a lot of media organizations where the business starts to falter, the editorial get kind of wind of it and kind of leave and it just gets caught in a negative downward spin. I think that that is really concerning, and I'm concerned that that could happen with the post right now. But I will say, you know, I think it still is, as JVL pointed out, the second most famous, well-known brand in America.

It still does, despite all of the kind of nicks and dings and whatnot, like even as of this, yesterday this morning, they were still producing great journalism and reporting. I guess the optimist's case would be that they run lean. They're much more, they're much less ambitious on the editorial side about what they, what they want to do and they focus on what they do well. The hope is maybe that they're able to kind of like take some of this Washington insidery stuff back from the politicos or the axioses or even, you know, kind of come for us a little bit in terms of, in terms of the business. That's pretty much the, I would say that that's kind of the optimist case, maybe build some more kind of like tailored products,

newsletters that are appealing to people, podcasts that people want to listen to that are more kind of highly tailored and specific. You just cut the podcast people. I know. I will say they cut their, I mean, you know, for what it's, and no disrespect to this podcast at all, but they cut the podcasts that they have that was supposed to be their version of the daily.

It's kind of hard to compete with the daily when there's the daily. There's up first. We do. There's all of these other. Yeah. I mean, but you guys do, you guys have a point of view, I think that the real other problem, right, is they need a real point of view,

a definitive point of view that people are buying into. And I don't really know if they have that right now with the free markets, free expression. That would be the total brand remake. Yeah. Oh, well, let's just put Adam O'Neill front and center. I mean, slap that guy's face on a podcast icon and, you know, people are going to line up.

Now, look, we're thinking about those all wrong because, you know, we're talking about, like, you know, how do you save it? This is the Jeff Bezos saved version of the post. Again, like, it gets back to where this is what he wants. And this idea that, like, oh, we're in a spiral. We're in the spiral that he created. If he was concerned about pulling out of the spiral,

then he would have reversed course after the endorsement insanity. And he would have fired Will Lewis after Will Lewis publicly lied. Again, this is the idea that a publisher can say in public things which turn out to be verifiably untrue, no news institution can survive that, right? You cannot have the top of a newspaper, a guy who was lied to the public even once. But we didn't get any of that

because this is what Bezos wanted. And so we're like talking about this in good faith terms of like, well, if I was running the paper, how would I get it to a place where it can be financially sustainable and what? And that's, again, they've lost more money in 2025 than they did in 2024 because they're making the moves that Bezos wants. Well, it's a really sad day.

It's an angry. I mean, like I said up top, I'm angry about it. It's a tragedy what this man. I'm really, sounds like a crazy angry person. You guys are like, you know, you're like Mr. Spock, you know, all Vulcan and very, you know, I'd like to analyze this. Well, I want to say, I just don't run as hot as you do, JV.

No, there's one other outcome here that I, that we neglected to mention. thinking about it while JVL was talking here, which is, of course, that Bezos sells the post to somebody who wants to. Do you think he's going to? I've seen no indication that he wants to. It seems like they... Talk about selling low. Jesus Christ. Yeah, they would be selling low, but I'm sure they could find someone to pay a lot of money. It's... No. It is the... It is the paper in the age of Trump. Yeah, maybe. There's people who are interested. That's for sure. Nobody with the resources to, you know, buying the... I don't know if you guys remember this. The Pontiac Silver Dome was sold for a million dollars. This is like 15 years ago.

And I remember when it went on sale, I was like, I called 20 of my buddies. And we sat and we thought through, could we buy the Silver Dome? Like, if we all pooled our money, could we do it. And then, like, we could just go there once a year on Thanksgiving Day and play flag football in the fucking Silver Dome. It would be amazing. But the problem was the carrying costs. Right? The carrying costs were incredibly high. The carrying costs of the post are really, really high, right? It's not the purchase price. I bet that thing could be had for $250 million. But the carrying costs in its current configuration are really high. And the problem is the type of people who could afford to bear that right now, if they were going to save the post, mean like make it antagonistic

towards the authoritarian regime, they would be making themselves economically vulnerable. And so until we return to something like regular America where the executive branch isn't controlled by a guy who will sue his own government for $10 billion and extort the, you know, people who are hoping to have mergers before the FTC, I think it's going to be very, very hard to find somebody with pockets that deep enough who isn't also really vulnerable. I think that it certainly makes it a less appealing target for some buyers. But I do think that there are buyers. There are people out there who have a lot of money, who are interested in media, who don't

like Donald Trump, who could definitely, who would definitely be interested if they knew that it was for sale. Axel Springer. If you are one of those people, you should, well, I don't know if that's their perspective. He would love to buy the post for what it's worth, I'm sure. But although he's, he doesn't like, he has. a complicated thing with newspapers, Matias, their CEO. But I will say that there are definitely some people who would love to buy it if it was for sale. I think really what it is is Bezos

hasn't expressed any desire to sell it. This is, as you pointed out, JVL, this is his vision for what he wants the post to be. So now it is what it is. Would you expect him to actually ever do any public interfacing around the post? He's done none. He's on occasion he's pop, he pops up in the newsroom and he seems a little bit more engaged. And obviously he was engaged with some of their opinion refocusing last year towards free expression and free markets. But he doesn't really talk about it. He doesn't really do many public interviews at all unless it's about like entrepreneurship or something like that. So he's, he doesn't, I don't expect it anytime soon. He has, his spokesperson doesn't usually respond to this. It's hard to say. I mean, at various points,

he's been really engaged and at various points he seemed disengaged. The people who really interface with him and know his point of view, it's a very, very, very small group of people, which is why the news doesn't leak out very much. I have tried to figure that out. All we know at the moment is that it's not really for sale. I think part of it, too, is he bought this for as part of his image, I guess, and maybe his image has taken a ding with some people. Maybe He thinks that it's improved with some other people he wants to carry favor with right now. To be clear, that's not my reporting. That's just speculation because we don't really.

He literally was meeting with Pete Heggseth yesterday. So I don't think we have to jump through many hoops to get to that conclusion. All right. We're going to leave it there. JVL, Max, thank you so much for those who are watching. Thank you for doing that. Look, subscribe to the bulwark. We aren't doing this shit.

We'll leave it at that. Talk to you guys later.