
It would appear that the hacks at The Washington Post (WaPo) are experiencing quite the post-Trump lull. And who better to gloat about it than their competitors to the north?
In the years after Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, business boomed. Droves of readers bought digital subscriptions, and the newsroom roughly doubled in size, adding hundreds more journalists.
But The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.
The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances.
What struck me about this article was the amount of effort that the Times put into writing about the misfortunes of a rival. The authors do toss a little perfunctory “propagandists in arms” praise WaPo’s way, writing that its newsroom “remains one of the most formidable in the country.” They’re then quick to point out that, while WaPo has been losing readers post-Trump, the Times and The Wall Street Journal have been adding them.