The layoffs hitting the Washington Post are significant and further shrank one of the nation’s largest, by journalist head count, text-focused media outlets. As an avid news consumer, and someone who lives in the D.C. area, they were especially painful. But as a realist, they were also somewhat expected.
The clients we work with, professional services companies, have a unique challenge in that their “product” is abstract and their target business audiences are select. This means that for general news outlets, serving wide audiences like the Post, it is challenging to pique a reporter’s interest ─ but much more so in the last five years.
Previously, newspapers had armies of people writing with robust revenues from classifieds, display ads and the huge bundle of Sunday inserts. This meant content was dictated by subjective “newsworthiness,” rather than known performance ─ an unheard-of metric until clicks and screen time could actually be counted.
For our legal clients, some markets had dedicated legal reporters. And most business sections ran un-paid “On the Move” announcements, giving firms a venue for exposure. Today, this is all gone, and some of the local titles have turned into shells ─ often run by profit-wringing private equity, relying on the inertia of older generations to pay for minimal content more as a ritual than a value-add. (Sometimes they also just want the daily crossword.)
When I moved to the D.C. area, the Post was an anomaly ─ a national paper with local coverage, or a local paper with national coverage, depending on how you looked at it. Nationally, the first Trump administration and its heavy news flow led to a pause in some aspects of the media reconfiguration: The Post actually grew and was profitable. The decline resumed and accelerated greatly when the pandemic hit and may not have hit bottom yet.
The justification for the Post’s layoffs was that the paper is losing gobs of money, partially as it can see that stories being written are just not being read. Executioner/Executive Editor Matt Murray sent up a warning flare during 2024 layoffs, “We are losing large amounts of money….Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”
(Before we continue, in 2024, the Post pulled its presidential endorsement, leading to scores of cancellations. This is certainly one factor, and perhaps a mortal self-inflicted wound, in its readership decline.)
Newspapers are not alone in this strange fulcrum moment, as we discussed recently regarding what’s happening on broadcast TV. Consumers only have so many hours in the day and fundamentally many longstanding traditions in news and broadcast are archaic and date back to a wildly different and simpler era. It is inconceivable to me that my kids will ever have a physical newspaper dropped at their doorstep, dedicatedly watch the evening network news or make a weekday comedy talk show “appointment viewing.”
New Ways are Needed
Another example of the identity crisis/pivot media is enduring is CBS News, where new ownership installed Bari Weiss of The Free Press and tasked her with overhauling a brand that includes 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News. Weiss’ moves since joining have been critiqued, but she offered up a painful and true assessment, “The honest truth is right now we are not producing a product that enough people want….Our strategy until now has been clinging to the audience that remains on broadcast television, and I’m here to tell you that if we stick to that strategy, we are toast.” She’s right.
Weiss’ blunt assessment is to TV news what the Post’s Murray’s is to that outlet when he noted the paper is “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product.”
Dollar Store Cable Channels
Another example is CNN. Still a “crown jewel” in broadcast news, but now an appendage ready to be cleaved off by Netflix if its acquisition of Warner Brothers-Discovery is approved. In fact, beyond Paramount Skydance’s strangely all-inclusive bid for WBD’s cable channels, no one ─ not even WBD itself ─ wants them anymore. This includes big brands like TNT and TBS. Comcast is ahead of the curve and already spun off a passel of channels, including CNN competitor MS NOW. Are these channels relevant? Less and less. In fact, even Paramount Skydance values the whole package of channels at just $1 a share in bid of more than $25 a share. Ouch.
Beware the Zombie Brands
This is also a dangerous moment for reputations. If I had a time machine and went back to the year 2007, outlets like Newsweek, TIME, U.S. News and World Reports and Sports Illustrated mattered and produced high-quality, national dialogue shaping content. They are all pretty much “toast” now. However, their trailing brand reputations/halos makes them and other old-line outlets attractive to older generations who still associate them with prestige. Some of today’s relevant brands are tomorrow’s clickbait content farms and AI slop mills.
Take Fortune. In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen’s character) holds up a copy and refers to it as “the Bible.” While Fortune still exists and does real journalism, ask any person under 35 if they know what it is. They won’t.
Part of our task as media professionals is to steer folks clear of sinking/sunken ships and towards relevant emerging media. Often titles hang on by selling events and opening up paid contributor areas ─ hospice for the brand whose fate is sealed.
The Path Forward
Change is inevitable and what is happening in media is painful and impactful for news consumers, PR people and their clients. We’re broadening our reach to target different audiences while also being more thoughtful about the role we can play shaping internal content production, distribution and amplification. And, while we aren’t encouraging folks to “write for the algorithm” of AI search, we are cognizant of its growing role in content consumption and working to ensure that our primary goal of great content is also complimented by our secondary goal of visibility and wide accessibility.
Text-based media still has an important role and there is a path forward – the New York Times and its bundling of games and cooking subscriptions show one option. I’m hopeful that the Post will successfully pivot but also resigned/preparing for a future where the “diet” of outlets I consume will change ─ maybe even for the better. A changed Post certainly beats the alternative that Pittsburgh is living through ─ a newspaper disappearing entirely.
For those alarmed about the shift at the Post, the past is instructive ─ particularly what the Times did. Without fanfare, they quietly axed their Metro section in 2020. And, following acquisition of standalone sports outlet The Athletic, they killed the Sports desk in 2023. The Post reorganized local (meaning cut it down further) and killed sports. Sounds awfully familiar! (International coverage was also cut, with no meaningful corollary at Times.) The Times continues to be the paper of record, just no longer all things to all people and not much of a “New York” outlet.
For professional services companies, this noise can be unsettling, but your signal needs to remain strong. Quality and timely thought leadership driving human connection is what we do together, and nothing has changed. You keep focused on your business’ mission, and we will stay focused on the communications challenge.