The Washington Post is in financial trouble, and there are rumors of deep cutbacks to come. This is from the sympathetic Guardian:
Those long-rumored cuts now appear to be close, with staffers expecting the ax to drop in early February – though nothing is certain. Inside the Post, staffers have tossed around estimates of potential cuts, with most exceeding 100, which would represent more than 10% of the newsroom – but no one really knows how widespread the cuts will be – or in fact if they will happen at all.
With luck, they will. The Post has canceled plans to cover the Winter Olympics:
On Friday night, in one of the first tangible actions suggesting how dire the paper’s financial situation might be, the managing editor, Kimi Yoshino, sent a memo to the sports department informing them that the Post would not be sending anyone to Italy to cover the upcoming Winter Olympics.
A group of staffers sent an impassioned letter to owner Jeff Bezos, begging him to bail out the struggling paper, but he doesn’t seem to have responded.
I confess to a case of schadenfreude. Put another way, it would be easier to sympathize with the Post (and, to be fair, most other newspapers) if they didn’t lie all the time. John Nolte has performed the public service of tracking media hoaxes over a period of years. His list, while not complete, is more than sufficient. He responds to news of the Post’s plight:
When you don’t tell the truth, even those who are aligned with you ideologically don’t respect you, and they don’t need you. Washington Post, RIP.
