Tag: #trump

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Broken Trust: Lessons from the Downfall of the Washington Post

The Washington Post is collapsing, and this is affecting people far beyond the media industry. On the one hand, this is because Washington itself has been shaken, not just an institution brimming with Pulitzer Prize winners that once brought down a president. Thanks to various movies, Watergate is a household name to younger people as well. On the other hand, the capitulation of the media company – it can hardly be called anything else in view of the layoffs of 300 journalists and the withdrawal (or dismissal) of CEO Will Lewis –, also shines a spotlight on the state of the industry. In the new, rapidly changing media world, no one is safe, not even the proud Washington Post. 

The case is both unique and generalizable. Unique because it is not only about the decline of a media company, but also about the moral decline of Jeff Bezos as a person. The Amazon founder bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million and held on to it despite several offers, his motivation for doing so never becoming entirely clear. It is generalizable because there are some lessons to be learned from the collapse of the Post. The layoffs are accompanied by a redirection of content, which one may not like but can understand given the circumstances.

But first, let’s look at the specifics. This is the Bezos who, during Trump’s first term in office, approved the Post‘s advertising slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” and gave the highly decorated then editor-in-chief Martin (Marty) Baron a free hand in exposing all the crimes and misdemeanours emanating from Washington. Baron, who has been publicly expressing his deep disappointment with Bezos for some time, described all this in detail in his book “Collision of Power,” published in 2023. The same Bezos then decreed shortly before the 2024 presidential election that the Post was not to publish any endorsement this time around. Given the timing, this was seen by many as kowtowing to candidate Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of readers subsequently quit as subscribers. Right after the announcement, the editorial team reported 250,000 cancellations, ten percent of the total digital subscribers.

Since then, Bezos has joined the ranks of those tech bosses who have curried favor with the new administration not only symbolically, but also in deeds. Whether this is done for purely business or possibly even ideological reasons will vary from case to case. One might kindly assume that Bezos is concerned with his fortune and not with a long-planned coup to undermine the fourth estate in the capital. But the fact that he had the opinion section trimmed toward “personal freedoms and free markets” shortly after Trump took office also indicates a change of course. In American newspapers, the opinion section is not headed by the editor-in-chief, but by an opinion editor, David Shipley, who subsequently resigned. Here, the specific contains something general: it is a risk that should not be underestimated to rely structurally on the moral integrity of a single person, billionaire or not. (This should also be taken to heart by those who see the future of journalism in the creator economy, by the way.) In other words, the “billionaire buys newspaper” business model can work as long as that billionaire remains true to his or her values.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, the management of the Washington Post has now imposed drastic cost-cutting measures: more than a third of all reporters have to go, the sports and literature sections are being completely shut down, and foreign reporting is being scaled back. A Ukraine correspondent received her notice of termination while reporting in Kiev. The tech journalist who was responsible for the coverage of Amazon also has to leave the company. The new focus will be on domestic and security policy. It’s back to basics in Washington. 

It’s to be expected that journalists around the world are reeling amidst these announcements. They mourn the decline from the celebrated, well-resourced competitor of the New York Times to a publication targeting the Washington home team. Once again, attractive job opportunities are disappearing. Sports reporters feel their days are numbered—quite a few top journalists began their careers on the sidelines of sports grounds. And those who dream of working as foreign correspondents or already do so are once again cringing. It has long been obvious that there is less demand for this type of reporter in a globally and digitally connected world than there was in the days when having a pair of eyes on the ground was essential for publications with a journalistic reputation.

However, the WaPo‘s return to its core values can also be interpreted as a long overdue step. In an information and communication world where content is increasingly brought to light by AI searches, every media company must find its own special place, making itself indispensable and distinctive. What department stores have been experiencing for decades is now also coming to the media industry: the concept of a full-range retailer no longer works. Relying solely on a glorious past, a strong brand, and brilliant journalists is not enough. The Washington Post has reacted rather late to this development. But at least it is doing so. Media organizations that are less strict with their balance sheets still have this painful process ahead of them. Where the restructuring is delayed for too long, there may eventually be nothing left to save.

You can already hear the critics shouting: “But The New York Times…” Yes, in the same week that the Washington Post announced its downsizing plans, its New York rival published strong figures. But the management there has done a number of things right, which is now benefiting it in a winner-takes-all economy. Unlike the Washington Post, it has not relied solely on its strong journalism. It is a painful truth for journalists that the material for which they sometimes risk their lives is only one component of a bundle that people are willing to pay for. Millions of people today subscribe to the NYT not (only) because of its award-winning journalism, but because of the recipes, puzzles, and product reviews. With a clever internationalization strategy in the form of affordable subscriptions for customers outside the US, it understood earlier than its competitors how to build global loyalty. There is a certain irony in this: in retail, Amazon, as the remaining full-range retailer, has pushed countless others out of the market. Similarly, the New York Times is valued by educated classes worldwide as a powerhouse of media expertise that also helps you cook. There is no need for a second global player that now also has the misfortune of being associated in its name with an unreliable world power and its vassals. 

However, it is not only the Times that is growing. In light of the crisis at the Washington Post, Charlotte Tobitt, a journalist at the British Press Gazette, examined the digital strategies of five successful American media companies. What they all have in common is that they have also established themselves in fields beyond pure journalism, whether it be the development of special digital products or events. This shows growth is possible in these market conditions. But it requires a strategy that goes beyond news journalism.

It is an open secret that strong investigative stories, such as those that established the Post‘s reputation, are good to cultivate ones image. However, because they are expensive to produce, most companies can only afford a handful of them in a certain period. But if you want to attract loyal media users, you need to get them to visit your site as often and for as long as possible. This is more successful with content that is more relevant to the lives of the specific target audience. Data analysts in many newsrooms know that the journalism that wins awards is often not the journalism that scores with the audience—and vice versa. 

In the case of the Washington Post, the concept of investigative strength had even worked in the early Trump years: the many Trump critics in the capital were well served. During Joe Biden’s presidency, however, the connection to this readership weakened. Many no longer knew why they should subscribe to the Post of all newspapers. At the same time, successful digital start-ups such as Politico had challenged the newspaper’s unique selling point as a Washington insider. It was no longer necessary to subscribe to the Post to stay informed about events within the Beltway. According to official statements, the Post now wants to reclaim this territory.

In the age of AI, every company must also consider which field it wants to play in in the future. As understandable as the outrage over the discontinuation of the sports section is, reporting on results or detailed reports on the successes and failures of various teams can confidently be left to AI. For example, the BBC is already successfully using AI-automated audio commentary in regional sports—even in local accents. In the future, sports reporting will have to focus on personalities, lifestyle, and well-told stories. Incidentally, the New York Times also took the lead in this area when it acquired the appropriately positioned media brand The Athletic in 2022 – for more than twice the price Bezos once paid for the Post.

The same will become apparent in other areas of reporting: simply being there is no longer enough. Those who report internationally must do so better or differently than The New York Times, for example, with a view to a specific audience. Those who recommend books need a strong community or personal brands with extremely high credibility around them. Those who offer service or explanatory journalism should take the ChatGPT test: they must clearly exceed the level of chatbots. Media brands have a good chance of asserting themselves in the flood of artificially generated content if they sharpen their profile and build and maintain credibility with strong content or personalities.

Incidentally, what Jeff D’Onofrio, the acting CEO and former CFO of the Post, said after Lewis’s departure is not enough. He announced that the company wanted to use data to decide what customers needed. Data is indeed indispensable for steering and adjusting the offerings. However, what is even more important are values. This is especially true for media companies that are committed to democracy, as the Washington Posthas long been. Those who betray their value proposition to customers should not be surprised when their community implodes. The future of journalism is built on trusting, loyal relationships. The Washington Post has a long, hard road ahead of it.

This column was published in German by Medieninsider on 10 February 2026. It was translated with DeepL and edited by the author.   

 

 

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Jay Rosen: “Journalists have to become more explicitely pro-democracy”

Jay Rosen, journalism professor with New York University, recently joined the Board of the new Bonn Institute for Journalism and Constructive Dialogue. His reasoning: If journalism is to survive in a polarized world, it has to provide perspectives and solutions. In this interview, initially published by Medieninsider, Rosen talks about attacks on democracy, diversity, innovation, and why the media industry is particularly reluctant to change. 

Medieninsider: American journalism has been pretty hung up with Donald Trump, now he is gone, at least as a president. What has this done to the industry?

Jay Rosen: Donald Trump was good for ratings and for subscribers, he was good to create interest in the news, but I don’t think anyone misses the kind of frenzy everyone went into when he tweeted something. The more serious question is, what happens when he runs again? Because his whole approach is to destroy journalism, to destroy trust in it. He tells his supporters, the press is critical with me, because they hate you. How should journalism respond to that? I think the industry has been reluctant to face this question, also because the stakes are so high.

But the industry must have learned something from the Trump years?

Our journalists did learn to say sometimes: This is a lie. They didn’t do that before that often. To simply offer a platform to someone who proceeds to supply disinformation is something journalists should not participate in. So the challenge is, how to avoid amplifying disinformation while still covering the news. The press is finally waking up to the fact that some people are antidemocratic. There are not just populists but fascists in that crowd. There is a real danger here to America democracy, and it is coming from an awakened right wing. Right now, the mainstream press doesn’t know what to do about it. A complicating factor is: The right wing has its own media system now and it doesn’t necessarily need the rest of the press. In this ecosystem things that we would call misinformation and disinformation are absolutely believed and promoted. There are actions being taken on the basis of misinformation and disinformation, like changes in law and governance, that arise from politicized fiction. Fox news is an extremely important actor in this. 

Has the significance of Fox News decreased now that Trump is gone or has it increased?

Increased! Now that Trump is out of the way, Fox is the home of his supporters. In a way Tucker Carlson, who is the most powerful figure in the Fox lineup, has taken over from Trump as a nightly presence. It is a very potent organization. 

Are these really two different worlds of journalism, or is there a crossover of journalists?

There is very little of it, a few journalists who start in conservative publishing like for example the National Review might change to other media like CNN or one of the big newspapers. But an increasing part of the right-wing media sphere is consumed with fiction and things that never happened, like the stolen election. Once you have written stories on premises that are false, it is very hard for that person to shift somewhere reputable, because they are on record with it. 

Many European countries have strong public service media. We like to believe that a polarization like that could never happen here.

That is a huge advantage and does make it harder for this extreme propaganda approach to reach as many people. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it couldn’t happen. There are political forces on the extreme right wing, also in Germany. If they can discredit the public service media complex enough, if they can wip up resentment against paying the fees that are necessary to keep it going, they may be able to weaken the political support for public service broadcasting as part of their political campaign against elites. That would erode this advantage. You can witness this in the United Kingdom, where the Conservatives are attempting to push back the BBC. 

It is hard to overemphasize how much hatred for the media is itself a huge mobilizing factor in the politics of the right wing

What could the US teach the world about doing journalism in a polarized society?

We don’t have anything to teach the world with that. About 25 to 30 percent of the American voters are in many ways lost to mainstream journalism. It is not that they don’t use it. They mistrust everything they see. And it even goes beyond that: If a story appears in the mainstream press, it is a reason to disregard or disbelieve it. This is active distrust. It is hard to overemphasize how much hatred for the media is itself a huge mobilizing factor in the politics of the right wing. Nationalist populism generates power by raging at elites, and the central elite in that system is journalists. Resentment against the press is a political mechanism. 

What kind of consequences do reputable Media draw from that? Have they changed their approach?

I tend to say they are not doing enough. One thing we have seen is that how much the Republican Party has taken on the Trump attitude and approach. It is now the Republican way of operating, even if Trump is not involved. For example, Republicans are trying to make it harder to vote. Or they are making it easier for public officials to manipulate the vote. One of the things big news organizations are doing is they are putting a lot more people on the voting beat, covering changes in the voting system. The Washington Post has a new democracy desk, AP is doing something similar

Do journalists have to stand up more for democracy?

Journalists have to become more explicitely pro-democracy. They have to undertake the defense of democracy. That includes things like reporting about voting but also about disinformation. When you have a party that is turning anti-democratic, and you are supposed to cover that party fairly, you have a problem, because you are also supposed to be pro-democracy. Unfortunately, in the States being pro-democracy is increasingly seen equivalent with being pro Democrats. 

In 2018 you spend a summer in Germany studying “German press think”. What is it that makes German press think different?

One of the pillars of German press think is that journalism should help to prevent the return of totalitarianism. We don’t have that in the US.

Funnily, this is exactly what Americans taught Germans after the Second World War. So, is it time now for the American press to learn from Europeans?

That’s right. I don’t think in any of these problems we have talked about, American journalists are the leaders. 

Newsroom leaders have more and more to decide will they have the view from nowhere to prevail or will they have the “diversify the newsroom project” to prevail?

These pressures come at a time when many American newsrooms seem to be consumed by internal debates, for example about diversity and identity.

The campaign to diversify the American newsroom has gone on for about 30 years, even longer. The warning that the news media is too white goes back 50 years. The campaign hasn’t worked. In positions of power, you don’t see any real movement. Lots of minority journalists got frustrated with that and quit. 

Even with Dean Baquet having been the first black editor of the New York Times? 

Yes. In fact, just last year they had to do this big report on newsroom culture. The younger generation of minority journalists is more committed to these changes, they are less likely to accept excuses. They have also more tools for expressing themselves, they can always go to the internet. There is now a kind of confrontation happening between rhetoric and results. It is revealing this contradiction at the heart of the diversify the newsroom process:  Journalists are being recruited into the newsroom to bring in a different perspective to the news. Once they are hired, they are told to check their perspective at the door and show that they can be a professional like everyone else with a view from nowhere, as I call it. Newsroom leaders have more and more to decide will they have the view from nowhere to prevail or will they have the diversify the newsroom project to prevail. 

The debate about impartiality in journalism is alive and well in Europe, too. What do you think about it? 

I have to be careful when I talk about it. It depends a lot on what you mean by impartial or objective, in the United States that tends to be the term. We need journalists that are intellectually honest. If objectivity means, let’s use facts rather than arguments, that is important. If objectivity means getting a larger picture, that is extremely important as well. Impartiality means trying to describe what the situation really is instead of what we prefer it to be, that is super important and very basic to journalism. But if impartiality means you are above it all and you have no perspective, that is a lie. If you think of yourself as the only one who doesn’t have an agenda because you are a journalist, it is a dangerous thing to believe. 

The BBC has reworked the concept to make it fit their purposes, their regulator Ofcom now calls it due impartiality, meaning it has to acknowledge the context.

They discovered that the old concept didn’t work in daily newsroom practice. They saw that their managers who run the desks where doing this with climate change, to allocate the same time to climate change proponents and deniers. That is not what they wanted, so they went through this process. If you have two parties and one of them is powered by fictions, lies, and disinformation, simply reporting on what they do feels and sounds biased. 

If our newsrooms cannot learn how to become more helpful in problem-solving, they won’t survive as influential

The former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, says that the media has failed in the biggest story of our times: climate change reporting. Do you agree?

Today’s news system, at least the one we have in the US, is not designed to create public understanding. It is designed to produce new content every day. With climate change the first step that is required is learning, you need background knowledge, without this the news about climate change doesn’t make any sense. But our news system is not designed to create background knowledge but to report what’s new today. It is a new challenge. Journalism has to become more problem-solving.

Is this why you decided to join the board of the new Bonn Institute for Journalism and Constructive Dialogue?

Yes. If our newsrooms cannot learn how to become more helpful in problem-solving, they won’t survive as influential. It is a huge challenge for the profession, this will be around for the next 20 or 25 years. It is not like this week’s flavor of ice-cream. For us journalists it used to be that our job was to uncover problems, to put a spotlight on them, and it was governments’ job to solve them. This is no longer appropriate. But the move toward solutions journalism is happening. In the US the Solutions Journalism Network has been active for 15 years. They have reached 30 000 journalists and  collaborated with over 300 newsrooms. The movement is slowly spreading. Even small changes can take years. 

Can you please give us an example how this is reflected in American journalism?

With mass shootings it used to be that there was all this publicity about the shooter. You could read his bio in all detail. This encouraged other shooters to take up their guns. Critics said to major networs: You cannot feature the shooters as the star of the story without encouraging more violence. Now the stories are much more about the victims. This is a response to the criticism. It took 15 years. The adoption curve in journalism is absurd, it takes too long. We don’t have that long. The 2024 election is around the corner, for example.

Why is this industry so slow in adopting change?

One reason is, journalism is a team sport, in most cases it is collaborative. You need everybody to be on the same page on what our job is. It is a consensus practice. If the consensus becomes a problem, journalists are reluctant to give up their intellectual tools even when they are broken, because they need everybody to operate in the same way. There is the production routine after all, deadlines have to be met. Additionally, journalists get a lot of bad faith criticism from people who are trying to undermine the press. This is why sometimes they get defensive about criticism. Also, there is a cultural thing: journalists are a herd of independent minds, they are people who think alike but also think of themselves as individuals who make their own choices. This is how White House correspondents work: in their minds they are intensely competitive with each other at doing exactly the same thing. But the business prospects for the press are dim if they can’t help solving problems. When it is done properly, you often see in the numbers that people are paying attention and their satisfaction with the product grows. If those metrics show that people are paying attention and they find this kind of journalism more valuable this is a huge thing. 

Do we have to revolutionize journalism education then?

Slowly journalism education is changing. We are now seeing programs that are focused on innovation, teaching people how to become innovators in the newsroom and in these companies. That’s not the way it has been for a long time. Journalism schools were usually trailing changes rather than the other way around. It would be a significant change if they led the way. 

Do we also need more executive education?

Leaders of news organisations have to become smarter with a lot of things. There is a lot of pressure around developing the business of news. The news industry had remained remarkably stable and profitable for a very long time. That created a culture that isn’t build for rapid adjustments and changes, it is not exactly agile. That the news industry has to learn from the tech industry. 

Is there anything else the news industry could learn from the tech industry?

Iteration. This is a buzzword, I usually try to avoid those. Because the costs of trying things have fallen immensely in the digital era, you can use iteration. See what works, improve it. Innovation used to be creating a new food section. Now it is about quickly changing your product in response to user data. Incorporating your audience in the production of the news is also a whole new world. Previously the job of the audience was to sit in their seat and consume the news. The job of journalists was, finish your story, job done. Now your job is: how to get it to the people who really need it. That is something you cannot really outsource. In job interviews it used to be that the editors who did the interviewing had all the skills, now they ask the job seekers explicitely about the skills they themselves don’t have.  

So, it is all about figuring out user needs. What are the user needs journalism can and should fulfill?

People do consume news because they want to know what’s going on. They need journalism to know what is true and not true, what they can ignore and not ignore. But also: They want to know, how are we getting out of this mess? They need a reason why to keep paying attention. 

Interview: Alexandra Borchardt, the text was first published in German by Medieninsider on 20th May 2022.