The Press Box - They Tore the Heart Out of The Washington Post

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Hello, media consumers. Bryan and David are here to discuss the news of mass layoffs at The Washington Post. They talk about losing your job in media in 2026 (1:47); how The Washington Post, specifically the sports section, got here; and how it could have been saved (9:30). They wrap up with a few other notes and thoughts from this major shake-up in the media landscape (34:18). Check out Bryan’s piece on the Washington Post layoffs here. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David ShoemakerProducers: Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers, and welcome to another crummy day in American media. This is the press box. It's Brian Curtis. It's David Shoemaker. It's producers Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin. David, this is not the day for piano music. Because at 8.30 Eastern time this morning, the Washington Post announced a massive layoff. Let these numbers wash over you. The Post is laying off more than 300 journalists, according to the York Times. There were somewhere around 800 journalists in the newsroom before. The Post is laying off 30% of its employees inside and outside the newsroom.

Among the many casualties today, the Washington Post Sports Section is dead, at least in, quote, its current form, as Executive Editor Matt Murray, said on a Zoom call this morning. More on what that might mean shortly. Foreign has been drastically cut at the post. Metro coverage has been cut. The book section, which was run by John Williams, is gone. Washington Post had a great book section.

I thought we should start with some feelings before we get to the nitty-gritty analysis here. Can you imagine losing your media job? job in 2026? No, I mean, it would just be absolutely, I mean, you just feel lost, right? I mean, what do you do? It seems like it was, it has, it's not even that, we're not even that far removed from times where there would be massive layoffs and there'd be some number of editors, maybe for online outlets or whoever, the Atlantic who would just kind of pop up and just

be like, if you're looking for work, you know, like drop me an email, I'll send you to, I'll put you in the queue. You know, there are people that were out there at least like voicing support in terms of there are job opportunities out there. But we don't see that at all anymore. And especially at this volume for, you know, what in a lot of cases are pretty specialized staffs, you know, like pretty like. And D.C. is such an interesting town and that it's, you know,

it's this paper has, well, previously had a, I mean, this incredible national platform. But especially like the Metro desk, even the books. I mean, so many of these departments, obviously the sports, they're so localized. I know those skills are transferable, but it seems like the kind of place where you would be, you could imagine staying your whole career, you know, and now these people are just cast out. It's pretty nuts. I mean, just even on, like, I know this is like the smallest thing, but like you're reading,

you look at all the, all the sections that they're cutting. And I was just thinking back to when you and I lived in D.C., like, what would be, what would have been our like, like, we go to, what was the place you get? the Sunday brunch buffet. It was that place south of DuPont Circle. Yeah, whatever that place was. I remember eggs and chicken wings. Yeah, yeah.

Those are different buffets. I think there was a wings buffet one night of the week. And then there was a breakfast buffet on brunch time. But like, just think back like, what would we have been reading? We got to that place to sit down and have brunch. It's like book section, nope, sports section, nope, metro section, nope. I mean, it's just like everything that made the Washington Post worth getting is gone. You're totally right about the characteristic of so many of these layoff,

some of these job loss events that we've chronicled over the last several years. There always seems to be an arc for journalists. The Atlantic folks is not going to create 300 more jobs for these jobs. people. No. The athletic, I'm going to guess, is going to hire Washington Post sports riders who are out there now. They can't create this many jobs. No. We're running out of arcs. Like the Washington Post was supposed to be one of those places. Whereas you say, you can imagine working there your whole life. If you get there, it's like, who, okay, I did something in the business, right? I unlocked an achievement. I got here. Now this is a place. I got to compete. I got to work hard. I got to keep my spot.

But the idea that 300 out of 800 people would suddenly be disappeared from the newsroom, where are those people going to go? How are those people going to regain something like what they had yesterday? Yeah. I mean, it's, there's, it's just impossible to say. Now, I guess there is, I mean, depending on, I mean, I feel it so I feel like there's other shoes to drop. I mean, but there, I mean, there is a model for independent publication, right? I mean, the Metro desk could reconfigure into an independent, you know, L.A. Taco style outfit.

Maybe bring some of the other people along with it. Can we pause on what you just said right here? No shade at L.A. Taco, but like, you know what I mean. We're talking about a section of the Washington Post refitting his L.A. taco style outlet. No, I just mean, you could have a local, I mean, you could have it like a, you know, you could have a news source for DC and Metro News that would so probably get a lot of traction and have, you know, a fraction of the overhead. There's possibilities, but it takes to certain sorts of people that want to do that, you know.

And you're right. I mean, there's just not, there's, I guess I was thinking about that because I was like, you know, you said the Atlantic's not going to get, not going to invent 300 new jobs. They certainly, they certainly won't. But I wonder who, like, if there's anybody with a DC foothold and money to spare that would just say, even if these sections aren't making money hand over fist, there's a real. there should be real incentive to being the publisher of them. That's a good point.

And we start to see that in L.A. L.A. Times so sadly diminished that all of a sudden Rupert Murdoch gets interested in California. Yeah. Other startups come in and say, what if I could, you know, do something here, if not the whole business of, you know, news of Los Angeles, than little parts of the business. and you know the post i think at least in these latter years has seen the fact that they cover all those things as a weakness but you could argue it with the opposite it was something of a strength to keep competitors away on everything other than politics yeah now what's to keep a competitor away with the paper so diminished as long as we're talking about feelings

I want to stipulate that the right way to feel today is to be angry. Yeah. And not angry in a shaking your fist at the societal and technological forces that are squeezing the media kind of way. But to be angry at the people who run the Washington Post. Yeah. Be angry at the owner who said he would be a good steward of the newspaper. We live in a timeline, dude, where that owner, released his company, paid 40 million. billion dollars reportedly for a Melania doc.

Yeah. And today the post laid off people who covered the Middle East. Mm-hmm. That's it. That, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's a particular. that newspaper to exist in a strong state. Well, and I don't know.

I mean, maybe this is beside the point, but the rationale, I mean, in the memo, all the explanations that we've gotten, there hasn't been a ton, are even more maddening. I mean, it would be infuriating, but it would be somewhat, there'd be some level of respect and the honesty if they were just like, like, we have a much different concept of what the Washington Post should be. Like, you know, we're like, we just didn't want to have these sections. We just want to, all we want is, all we want is the placard and, and the, and the access that it gives us, you know, but to be talking about this in terms of like, the evolution of the paper and synchronicity and shit is just, that makes me even more mad because it's like you're, you cannot be this stupid. We all know you're not this stupid. So why are you lying to us also? There are a couple people that walked right up to the idea that this is a two-year plan that the people who run the post were executing. Now we're seeing the next stage of the plan. I'm like,

Give me a break. Trying to retcon this whole thing into a coherent idea about how to steer the newspaper into the future. I'm sorry, what part of the plan was laying off 300 people? Yeah. 300. I want to talk to you about the Washington Post Sports section. Because what happened to sports today is emblematic of what's happening to the Post generally. I've talked to a bunch of people who worked in that section over the last several days.

again, as long as we're talking about feelings and I don't think we should neglect that subject when we're talking about mass layoffs. This has been an enormously shitty week in change for those people. It was January 24th, so a week ago Saturday when Dylan Byers tweeted out the possibility that the section could close.

When I saw that tweet, I was like, I don't believe you. I believe you're reporting, but I don't believe the idea that the post would abandon its sports section. Yeah. As soon as I reached out to those people, like, yeah, actually, it's happening. And our bosses have told us, you need to start looking for work.

You need to start looking for another job. Yeah. So a lot of the people in that section have spent the last week writing job memos, calling each other, asking around at the post if they could work another beat at the newspaper. And at least, let's see, two cases I know of, they were told they could not do that because the Washington Post had a number of people. It wanted to lay off.

It wanted to hit that number. So even if these were talented reporters that you'd say, hey, let's just put them on the national desk. Let's put them in a different part of the paper. You could not do that. Yeah. Because you had to get to the number. Yeah.

There's that. It's crazy. In terms of like letting talent walk out the door, it absolutely is crazy. I want to come back to a note I had with you and Joel the other day, which is this, again, I think it's a great time to just resist nostalgia for Washington Post Sports Section of Hold, doing the Tony Mike Boz roll call. That stuff is fascinating. It has nothing to do with the people who lost their jobs today.

They don't feel any better because they worked at a section where, famous sports writers once worked. Yeah. It just does nothing. The far more interesting question to me is what happened? How did we get to a place where the post is closing its sports section? Now, I think if you and I turned back the clock and we went back two years to the beginning of the Will Lewis era, Will Lewis publisher of the Washington Post. Remember that famous quote that we have now seen reheated 900?

times people are not reading your stuff. I can't sugarcoat it anymore. He said that in 2020. What I would have expected to happen is somebody who is a top editor at the post coming to the sports section and be like, boys, girls, the party's over. Yeah. We can't do it old school style anymore. We can't, we can't cover sports like this.

Yeah. Here's the new plan that we are going to use to cover sports. And I can imagine those sports riders who've worked at the Post for a long time clutching their gamers to their bosoms and being like, how dare you tell us how to cover our beat? Yeah. According to all the people I've talked to over the last several days, that clash never happened at the Washington Post Sports section.

If management had radical ideas about reinventing the department, the writers I talked to never heard them. Yeah. So now we're getting to a place where the department is just gone. A bunch of those talented writers are just gone. And the paper is keeping a sports writing skeleton crew around, which according to Matt Murray on this morning Zoom call, will write features about sports as a quote,

cultural and societal phenomenon. Yeah. Now, that sounds interesting. It's also something that Washington Post sports writers were already doing. Yeah. Right. When Ben Strauss writes about Stephen A. Smith, who's making noises about running for president, that's covering sports as a cultural and societal phenomena.

Mm-hmm. When the Post writes about the business of college sports in this weirdo NIL world that we're in, that is absolutely that. Mm-hmm. So what they're saying is we're going to keep a couple of sports. couple of survivors intact and you are going to go to, I guess, the style section. Yeah. And write sports pieces, but we will not have a sports section as we once knew it.

Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense, right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, just spinning off what you were saying, it's like, yeah, if you were going to, if it was, I'm sure that there were probably a number of people in the sports desk that a year ago, two years ago, whatever felt relatively safe in their jobs. You don't get any memo from the new boss about how to improve yourself. You're like, well, of course, we're just the institution.

We're over here off to the side. You know, and he's focusing on other stuff now. But to not give any notes and then to just fire everybody, it just would make it even more maddening if you were there. You had no idea that your job was on the line. But maybe that makes me think, I don't know if it's part of a two-year plan, but maybe the idea was to never save the sports section. You know, I mean, it's just, but it doesn't make any sense. It really only makes sense through the sort of very narrow lens of like, which parts of this paper grant me, grant the parent company access in an interesting way.

You know? And sports was not one of those. I think it's a really weird and blindered concept of access if that's, if that's part of it. I mean, I think, you know, like owning and stewarding a newspaper, of the legacy and renown of the Washington Post, I think we'd do more to burnish your lifetime resume than getting in the right, you know, pleasing the right people right now, you know, getting the extra access that you probably already should have right now.

I mean, it's just sort of crazy. Let's talk a little bit about the sports section in its particulars. That section did a number of things well. It was very odd to use the past tense here, but that's where we are. They did big things well, big investigations, big enterprise pieces. They had a huge newsbreak just last month that the FBI is investigating the death of former Colts owner Jim Ursay. That led the Washington Post homepage, that sports article. It led the sports world for half a day.

which is like leading the sports world for a week in the old days. Yeah. Everybody went, uh, yeah. Columns did really well. Sally Jenkins columns before she left last summer were big hits. Candice Buckner columns more recently. The post pieces that rated well included Jesse Doherty's pieces about college sports that I mentioned, Strauss's columns about the media that I mentioned.

There's a guy there named Roman Stubbs who wrote outdoors features. that were just traffic monsters. Yeah. You have a guy like Kent Bab, remember his Kim Mulkey piece from two years ago? But Kim Mulkey went. Yep. In front of the press and said, this piece is so interesting. You can't possibly read it.

Don't you dare read it. This was, by the way, before the piece was even published. Yeah. What fantastic advertising for the post. those are things they did really well. Local sports writing, at least last year, it was a big struggle for the section to get people to click on those stories. Commanders last year went five and 12.

Yeah. That was a big part of the problem. The Wizards are the equivalent of five and 12 every year of my life, as far as I can remember. The Nats are down, the Capitol's like, that stuff was really, really hard again for them to get people to pay attention to. Now, 24, when Jay and Daniels is taking the commanders to the NFC championship game, here we go, baby.

Yeah, I mean, and I obviously have no factual basis for this, but it seems to me that probably the most ardent readers of local, local sports coverage in D.C. are probably reading it in hard copy, right? They're your daily subscribers, you know? I mean, that are just where it's a tradition to open up the paper every morning and check out the box scores. You know, I mean, and so, but I can imagine how that would be just a, it's a ridiculous uphill battle, but it's a cyclical thing, you know, it's not the sports writers, the department's fault that the teams are all terrible, right? And like you said, all it takes is just a two-game shift in the standings and suddenly you're doing 10 times the page views that you were before. You make a really interesting point about the diehards and the people reading it in print. Somebody said something to me that I just never thought about.

Now, like, there are two audiences essentially the Washington Post. There's a smaller audience that cares about the paper because it's the Washington Post. Probably largely a local audience, but I imagine there are some people like that outside of D.C. too. They care about the paper. They care about the history of the paper. They care about D.C. They care about D.C. sports.

That's one audience. And then there's a second audience much larger that is like, I like you because you have articles about Trump. And to that audience, it matters less what they're reading. They like Mattow, they like MSNBC, they like the New York Times. They like they just want political news. And squaring those two audiences is really difficult. But you see that in sports.

We're a Washington, D.C. newspaper, we kind of have to cover the capitals. Like what's, how would we just abandon that? Yeah. But we've got people coming in here who are reading political news. how are we ever going to get them to read about the capitals? What's one story we could do that they'd be like, oh, that looks interesting. Yeah. They're just, their interests are elsewhere.

So the section was structured in a way that some people inside were like, you know, we've got to find a way to fix this, right? We got to find, you know, we got to find a way to do more of this, less of this. We just need a plan. Post sports section also, again, it came out of a very successful print sports section. Yeah. So you had a lot of old school print stuff like, let's send a bunch of people to the Super

Pole. They had 14 credentials at the Winter Olympics before management pulled the plug. And I'm a guy who says, man, if somebody who owns your publication will put you on a plane, you are not obliged to say, no, sir, I will not get on that plane because that would cost this organization too much money and it will not be cost effective. That's not your problem. But even so, I was like 14 credentials to the Winter Olympics in Italy. Yeah.

That's a ton of people to send. Now, how could the sports section have been saved? Well, that's a funny question because I'm not sure that anybody on the masthead was that interested in saving it. Right. For the reasons you brought up. But there were a lot of people inside the section were like, you know what? We need to change. I'm all ears for change.

Yeah. Even radical change. Now, what could that change have looked like? Well, the easiest form of change that you and I know of in journalism as you go and you say, okay, see those articles that are getting a bunch of clicks? And do more of those. Do more of those. The ones that aren't getting clicks, don't do those.

Yeah. And you make the section either in whole or in part the stories that are getting the most clicks. Right? That's just, that's just, you know, again, that doesn't take any, that doesn't take anything, any kind of, any kind of larger thinking. More specifically, you could say, okay, so much of our readership now is people coming to the Washington Post for Trump news. Let's write sports stories that have a chance at catching those people's eyes. Like, Stephen A story, yep, that's going to be it. Yeah.

I'm going to explain NIL to you, this thing you've heard about, but maybe don't. totally understand. Okay, that's, that's a good one. The big investigation, the Kim Mulkey profile, a think piece where you take some bit of NFL news or commander's news and spin it around. Yeah. You could have said, hey, that's our business now, right? We're trying to write sports for people that may not be sports diehards. Mm-hmm. I'm trying to catch their right. That would have been a way to reinvent the section. Yeah. You know, you could have, we saw the management come finally in the last couple weeks and say, hey, Nat's riders, you can't go to spring training.

We're not sending our non-commanders riders on the road anymore. You could have done that two years ago and just say like, hey, the days of getting on every airplane? You know, I thought about that too in terms, just in terms of like, what is the, what is the value of a gamer when the game itself is one click away? You know, it's like with the, like the, you know, when we grew up reading,

you know, the little with three paragraph game recaps in the paper. It was because we had no chance of seeing that game when it was on the night before and certainly not like in a replay form or anything like that. And I know it's a lot quicker to read the recap. But I can imagine how that would, I don't know if the, if, you know, I imagine that the younger readers, the next generation of quote unquote readers are probably happy with a, you know, like TikTok highlight reel as opposed to like or a handwritten gamer.

I do think that it's that, that, you know, none of those ideas are mutually exclusive from one another. And I mean, it's just sort of maddening that nothing was given an opportunity. You know, I mean, like,

what would have, you're right, they have the platform to kind of like do whatever they want, you know? And I think that, I think that frankly, writing on a more deliberately national scale with a bigger staff would have probably been a really smart

been a really smart move. I mean, it's shocking to me, and I know that, you know, all of our, all of our algorithms are built into everything that we see, but it's kind of shocking to me how frequently I, I mean, I mean, it's all the time, how frequently I see athletic stories on the New York Times homepage, you know, when I'm going through New York Times stories, I'm reading something news, and then it's just like, you know, where's Anthony Davis going to get traded? And you're just like, oh, I want to click on that too. And we had so many questions about the integration of the athletic and the time.

when that happened, you know? The idea that there couldn't be a seamless sort of interplay between the stories and in a Washington Post setting is just sort of crazy. It's crazy. I just think there's in a bigger sense, and I don't know if it's the, you said, the smaller group of people who care about the Washington Post is like a local paper. I mean, I just kind of assume that there's a whole lot of people. I mean, you know, it's a huge chunk of the people that, like, we're never going to threaten to unsubscribe. Like, no matter what happened. and they're not going to like, there weren't the people posting images of their unsubscription confirmation, you know, on Twitter or whatever.

But that's just like a huge piece of any newspaper. And you cut big sections like this. I think you really risk losing your backbone, you know, losing the foundation. I think it's just a sort of, I really just don't understand the business of it. Somebody said really early on when it was first reported, it's just like, the Washington Post is, you know, the Washington Post is incredibly important in D.C., but if it's just another Axios, is it going to still be important? You know, and I think that's the real sort of, that's the real question.

And it really makes you wonder why any, like, whose bright idea any of this was? I completely agree. And that's the big question I have just as a strategic matter. Forget the moral dimension of closing your sports department, sending all these people away. if your newspaper takes journalistic ozimpe and becomes a newspaper that is primarily about politics and national security. One, aren't you just competing with Politico, Axios, Punchbowl, etc., etc.? Yes.

Duking it out for like, for a smaller patch of turf. And second, what happens when Donald Trump goes away? Yeah. Remember how Trump 2 didn't turn out to be the subscription bananza that Trump 1 was? Remember how the Washington Post long before Will Lewis, Matt Murray and all these people came in, fumbled Trump 1 when they were making tons of money? Yeah. Didn't figure out all these other products. What's going to happen when Josh Shapiro gets sworn in in January 2029 or J.D. Vance or anybody like that?

There's going to be a drop off again in the interest in politics. And now you are going to be a political newspaper, even more. so than you already are. Yeah, I mean, you know, Axios and Politico are, I mean, I don't have the numbers, but I would assume they're a little bit more insulated from those kind of market changes because they have a really specific target demo of people that want to read, you know, the morning newsletter every morning before they go to their jobs in Washington, D.C. or New York. But that's a totally different business model than even what the Washington Post is telling themselves they're doing now, you know and and it's it's yeah i mean it is it's going to it's going to disappear the bottom's

going to drop out and the things like i said that that normally would be always there to sort of buoy the numbers are things like metro and sports and books and and you know the things are getting rid of that even if they're not making you tons of money they're they're they're steady you know and it's it's uh and they must be aware of this That's what's so crazy about it. You'd think. You'd especially think they'd be aware of this after Jeff Bezos blocks the Kamala Harris endorsement. All the subscribers flee.

And then who else flees? Washington Post journalists that have options. Yeah. Do you think if you cut this many jobs that people are going to want to work there if they have other choices? Do you think this is a place that journalists want to be? Nope. even the political journalists who you're now, you know, orienting more of the paper around,

they're not going to want to be there. Yeah. Why would they want to be there now? They're going to see this as a place that is not stable. And they're going to say, hey, as soon as I get that other offer, I'm out.

We've seen more than 100 people make that decision. Yeah. And I'm just like the idea that you're going to be able to attract and keep talent. And look, the Washington Post, and I will give their editors, and mostly, well, actually, I won't give their writers as credit. When all those people walked out the door, they brought in new people, and they have more than kept up their end of the bargain by delivering political scoops, national security scoops,

and so forth. They've done a great job. They've showed us that there is this almost bottomless well or something like a bottomless well of ambitious young journalists who would have come in and kick ass on those beats. Yeah. I totally understand that. But I don't think you can do this forever.

I don't think you can be the Oakland A's of journalism and just tear it down and be like, well, you know, here's a, here's a, you know, analytically sound journalist that we found in, you know, Bucks County, Pennsylvania who's going to come right in and match with our, you know, shout up, shout out Bucks County. I know why I pick Bucks County. But like, I just don't think they can go on forever. And I just think like you are you're casting yourself in that in that way. Back to the board section for just a second. You're absolutely right that of all the things I outlined, none of them are mutually exclusive, all those possible reinventions. Another one, by the way, that you didn't mention that would have made a whole lot of sense,

you know, five years ago or 10 years ago is just rebrand. If you want to, if you want to streamline, you want to cut jobs, just rebrand it and do the, you know, the Grantland of Sally Jenkins or Tony Cornheiser, you know? I mean, just like just identify, brand it with the personalities that have just so much traction and let them go out fun.

Let's talk about personalities for a second. Would you believe me if I told you that the Washington Post Sports section had no podcasts? None. No. Zero podcast. It didn't have a commander's podcast.

Didn't have a general sports podcast. people inside the section pitched podcasts. Yeah. There were multiple iterations of a Sally Jenkins podcast in the works when she was there. Ava Wallace, who works at the paper head up podcaster in the 2024 Olympics in Paris that went away after the Olympics. There were long-form podcast pitch. They've got a lot of good long-form writers.

They had total of zero podcasts. Crazy. Somebody told me I didn't even use this quote in the piece that's up on the ringer.com. now, but somebody told me, it's like, are we the only media company that doesn't have split screen Instagram videos of our writers talking about the players we cover? Yeah. Like, honestly, like, how much does that cost? And it does what you say.

You turn these people into personalities. The people are like, oh, hey, that person is interesting. I'm going to look out for their stuff. It makes it a destination, you know? I mean, that's that's what you have to have people that are logging in. I mean, they're seeking it out. All of these scenarios we talk about for saving the post-sport section, they would have probably hurt other people in the section.

You say, hey, we're doing this person's thing, but not your thing as much anymore. Well, yeah. I mean, and also if you're looking, if you're shooting for an arbitrary headcount that you're getting rid of, you know, I mean, that's another, it's just like, why is reinventing the paper a, did feel like a whole lot like vulture capitalism.

There's some corporate consultancy in here. Why 300? You know, I mean, it's just so crazy. Totally. And the people I talked to inside the sports section, they told me these ideas were not presented to us.

They were kind of waiting for them to be presented in a way. They kind of expected somebody for management to come and just be like, here it is. Yeah. The new day starts now, and this is what we're doing. But instead, we proceeded to the closure of the.

section without giving those people a chance to hear a plan and try to execute the plan. And that is just that that that's just I mean, it's so utterly unfair to those people to not even give them a shot at doing something different. Yeah. You and I have a little feature on this podcast we call secular grace. Yeah. Where we take someone in the news who's, you know, Not exactly getting a lot of love notes.

And we say, what is the best possible reading of whatever it is they're doing? Is it possible to have secular grace for Will Lewis and Matt Murray right now? Well. Even as an intellectual exercise. I mean, I guess it's feasible. We don't know. Will Lewis could have been, you know, Bezos could have said to him, you got to get this shit going or we're going to.

fire a thousand people and he figured out a way to make it to get to get to get the number down to 300 you know i mean it's like there's no way to know to what degree he you know stood in front of the train or or you know eagerly put on his conductor's hat and pulled a choochoo court or whatever that thing is but yeah it's possible it's possible to conceive of a version of events in which they're not actually the villains but they took these draw this this position knowing that they would be the villain and ended up not succeeding in in keeping the paper going yeah exactly yeah either one um but yeah i mean it's really hard to imagine outside of we've got it all wrong what this what the secular grace component really is the only thing i could come up with is

their predecessors made mistakes friend ryan the publisher before lewis made mistakes Sally Busby, the editor before Murray made mistakes. Having somebody like Jeff Bezos swoop in and do what he did with the Kamala endorsement and chasing all those readers out the door and telling a huge chunk of politically minded potential customers, hey, this place isn't for you. You know, oh, you wanted to spend your money here. I'm going to make you think twice about that. Yeah.

That's a tough hand to play. I totally understand that. This is not the answer. This is not the solution. This ain't the play. Yeah. To close sections, to run people off like this in mass. It's just, again, for the reasons you and I talked about as a proposition, it just doesn't work.

It's not going to work. And it puts, and again, Post has so many excellent political reports, it just puts them under this crazy microscope. Like now you're not just competing with the Times, Politico, et cetera, et cetera. It's on you. Yeah. I mean, I think this is obviously part of why, I mean, the blame goes just all the way up to the top. This is why, you know, whenever there's a big job, like publisher of the Washington Post open, there's obviously a lot of a lot of call from inside the paper to elevate somebody internally, right? And if you hire someone from the outside, they don't have the same, the same legacy with the paper, the same vision.

of the paper or sort of like the internal or the the the institutional memory that comes with being a staff member for a long time and certainly not if you're hiring somebody for ideological purposes like Bezos probably did it's easy to imagine someone coming in and if they're like hey can you cut 300 jobs they're like okay what are the three sections I don't read you know like if that person is not interested then the choice is easy for them but could you imagine like someone who actually loves where they work or doing this or like even even i mean could you imagine that when rimnet got promoted to this job at the new yorker if some consultant was like talk of the town is just dying man we got to get rid of the

shit you know he'd be like no over my dead body you know like it's like you you have an appreciation for the history of the legacy of where the place you work and that in a lot of ways is what what makes a lot of legacy places continue to succeed because they take themselves and their tradition and their history as seriously as the audience does and If it's not working, if it's truly not working, fix it. Yeah. Try.

Yeah. Give it a shot. Absolutely true. Modernize it, reinvent it, break it, rebuild it, whatever. Just give it a shot. I keep waiting for some media reporter to do the contrarian. Actually, this is not a bad idea for the Washington Post bit. Oh, like the actual, like the specific corporate restructure.

I mean, there have been people out there. who were kind of like, like even people of, you know, some level of establishment who were just like making jokes about how this isn't that big of a deal or how, you know, it's the death of journalism is a good thing and whatever else. But actually, but actually defending, actually defending the, the specific restructuring would be pretty incredible. Yeah, I'm not talking about way-and-way journalist people. Those people just have kind of one bit that they do all the time.

Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, media reporters sometimes tend to be contrarians because, you know, you know, I think we hear journalists talk about themselves so much that we're eventually like, okay, you know, management's making a lot of sense. I just, you know, I was sympathetic, but now I'm, you know, I'm, I'm starting to, I'm starting to feel a little bit. I just haven't heard anybody say that here. I haven't even even everybody just even venture that as like, I know I'm going to be

attacked, but because I just don't see it. I don't see the good of it, you know, and especially when. their mortal enemy or i guess what used to be their mortal enemy the new york times has done absolutely the opposite yeah they've been like you know what we were the place you came for the crossword now we're the place you come for all the games yeah i cannot tell you how much time i spend playing new york times games every night i mean that's just become like i wish i could watch as much tv as chris and and see how as many movies as sean sorry i'm too busy playing the games on the the New York Times out.

That's like my whole life. Also, the cooking stuff, and you know, David, I don't know much of a cook. Same. But in our house, the New York Times has just become like, here is where we find what to make tonight. Yeah. It's an incredibly, like, that is by far, maybe they're, not by far, but that is certainly one of their smartest moves, just in making an accessible, absolutely, like, lovely navigable cooking site

that you don't feel like you're wandering off into some deep end of the web when you click on it. It's just like, you know what I'm talking about? Not like the creepy parts of the web, but the sort of like when you Google, it's not just cooking.

There's some things that you Google and everything is like a weird blog that's called like, like Susie Makes It or something. And you're just like, is this real news? I don't really know what I'm, I don't know what I'm reading here.

But yeah. Shout out to L.A. Taco and Susie Makes it. Susie makes it. I hope so nobody's squatting on that URL. I'll go grab it right now. But yeah, it's a, but yeah, the cooking section is great. The game section is great.

The podcast they do are very good. You know, it's like there's a, they really, and they were, in some, you know, at the time, it felt like they were kind of slow adapters

to the podcast space, you know, certainly to like making, to like put going all in on gaming, and cooking and stuff like that. But it's, it shows that you, that, and I think this proves itself over and over again, that you can be, like, when you think that you're too far behind to start something, you're almost certainly wrong if you just do better quality stuff, you know? I think I've told you this before, but I remember when Zach Lowe was starting the low post at Grantland back then, I remember thinking to myself like, God, with the last thing we need now is another basketball podcast in the world, you know? And not only is he come out and doing the best basketball podcast, so it's kind of beside the point, but there's been like nine million major basketball podcasts that have launched since that date, you know?

In the mold of Zach. Like they were like, I want to be Zach in particular. I want to talk about basketball like he does. But like, yeah, the time is just sort of proven that out so quickly. And that's one of the things you can do when you have a giant staff, you know, that isn't under the thumb of all these layoffs is that you can mobilize fairly quickly if you want. I mean, things sometimes go really slow, but giant moot. giant shifts like that can happen really quickly compared to other places because you're staffed up for it. I completely agree.

And again, you just try. The way to way to do those things is try. It was not completely obvious that the New York Times is going to be the place where David and Brian were looking for recipes 10 years ago. No. You and I are old enough to remember when the New York Times was on the ropes. Remember the Carlos Slim era? Yeah. Man, that paper was, there were a lot of, you know, death notices for that baby too.

You know, crossword. You and I did that when we were eating those delicious buffet brunches. We pulled out the New York Times crossword, but it wasn't obvious. It was going to be the stuff for games. The athletic at the New York Times, incredible. You and I could have, like, do a whole show about here are some things we wish the athletic did differently. But you know what? They have a sports site that's going strong.

Yeah. And then I, you know, I read their newsletter in the morning. Because I'm like, what happened in sports last night? Oh, here it is. you know it's like i just i just think like again the whole the whole notion of no we're not adding we're subtracting we're we're getting smaller yeah we're going to put it all we're going to we're going to put so many eggs in this basket which were already by the way in this basket at the Washington post yeah and and the fact that like and again this is not the people that run the papers

now fault but the fact that like oh politico we could have had that here at the paper axios we could had that punch ball we could have done that yeah there's no reason we couldn't do that yeah for sure inside the newspaper covering politics in washington we could have done all those things like he just like and do it now we're going to try to do it we're going to go all in against all those competitors and that's where our future's going to lie I said it's not going to work I don't know that it's not going to work I can't know that

I'm bad at predictions you're bad at predictions we don't know anything about this business but man I don't understand the future of the Washington Post right now

I just don't know and I can't believe the Washington Post doesn't have a sports section I can't believe it even now I can't believe it I can't believe

they would walk away from that I can't either it's just it's just stunning. I can't even imagine. I mean, obviously the person, the reader that they're imagining doesn't live in Washington, D.C. I think that's what it comes down to, right? Because, I mean, there's some narrow definition of a reader that you could draw that would say, that would eliminate the sports section, but it would include, it would keep the metro section, you know, like,

there's so many, there would almost certainly keep the book section, everybody that I knew that cared about, you know, politics. I was actually a D.C. resident was an incredible reader. Yeah, but the sports section being gone is just it's it's absolutely mind-boggling. It truly is. Our thoughts are with all the people who lost the jobs today. It's not worth much, but we're thinking about you out there. That is the press box. He's David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin. Thank you guys as always. All right, Shoemaker. Tomorrow, Joel and I are going to catch up on other media stories. including Don Lemon, the ESPN NFL media deal, finally getting done. Yeah. Have you been following this James Talariko influencer story?

Yep, absolutely. Man, that is a fascinating little capsule, a little view into journalism slash politics slash Texas. Yeah. We'll talk about that too. Shoemaker, I'll see you next week with more lukewarm takes about the media. you then, David. See you later, Brian.