A really bad idea on how to fix The Washington Post

When your audience is trying to tell you something, you should listen.

Layoffs. Closures. “Fake News.” Everywhere one looks, it’s plain to see the news industry is in distress. That may actually be an understatement. The news industry is encircled by flames. 

It may seem alarmist or hyperbolic, but given the current financial landscape for many news outlets, the required awkward dance they perform with tech juggernauts and the potential extinction-level threats presented by AI, it is essential that news organizations realize their immediate peril and act accordingly.

Sports Illustrated, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post – four major news companies that all announced significant staff reductions in the past 12 months. Vice, the plucky news and pop culture site courting young audiences, shut down vice.com altogether.

At each of those institutions there are specific issues that have ebbed their business, dulled their resonance and otherwise contributed to their current financial hardships. However, there is a universal truth that far too few media types in leadership positions, as well as respected veteran editors and reporters, are willing to acknowledge: News is not the commodity it once was. In fact, it soon may not be a commodity at all. Thus, an industry built on news requires a significant reevaluation in strategy if outlets don’t want to be swallowed by the flames.

Over the next few days in this space, I want to take some time to assess the landscape for modern news providers and media companies, examine some particularly prescient challenges and provide a few suggestions I believe could be beneficial to growing audience/revenue while girding against ongoing threats. I hope you’ll follow along.

Before taking an offered buyout in December, I worked at The Washington Post in a position where I and my department (Emerging News Products) would pitch ideas to the masthead and the newsroom at large, crafting new strategies and products to increase our impact, audience and revenue. And so it was with great interest that I read a February Politico article containing suggestions on how to correct the financial course at The Post after a year filled with layoffs and a massive, year-end buyout. The tips from former executive editors, publishers and other news organization leaders were directed to new WaPo CEO/Publisher Will Lewis as he began his tenure. A number of them troubled me. 

Some of the suggestions felt thin, but the ones that truly concerned me were those that overlooked basic facts about business growth and encouraged The Post to double down on what had made it great decades earlier. They advised a focus on accountability and politics. To me, such a course would likely only lead to greater staff reductions and further shrink the resonance and revenue of The Post. 

That belief is rooted in my view of the modern digital audience and, particularly, how it relates to The Post. From roughly 2014 to January 2021, The Post’s digital subscriptions swelled to a record high of around 3 million. Over that time, The Post’s website brimmed with the type of journalism for which the newsroom is famous, including Pulitzer-winning stories on secret surveillance by the NSA, lapses by the Secret Service, police shootings, Donald Trump’s claims of charitable giving and climate change, among others. Over the next three years, 2021-2023, The Post continued to publish those same powerful, urgent, Pulitzer-winning stories … and subscriptions and ad sales plummeted. 

What’s instructive about that spike and ensuing decline is that it had almost nothing to do with what The Post was doing differently in producing its stories. The subscriptions didn’t soar because The Post suddenly got good at political coverage and accountability journalism. Rather, the interest of the audience spiked because of the singular nature of the events of Jan. 2016 to Jan. 2021. Not only was there the so-called “Trump bump” driving digital traffic, but there was nationwide civil unrest, a pandemic and an insurrection at the Capitol. Marginal customers, who seldom cared about the news, were now drawn to it and The Post was doing a great job serving up those stories because it has always done a great job serving up those stories.

I say the spike had “almost” nothing to do with The Post’s work because there absolutely was work in that newsroom that was helping drive traffic and it extended beyond traditional journalism. Audience-minded editors were focusing on packaging each story as perfectly as possible – optimizing headlines for search engines, crafting stirring social media posts and adorning them with eye-catching photos or graphics. As a result, those stories stood out on Google, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc., which made them easily discoverable by the growing news audience.

Just as The Post remains excellent at producing world-class journalism, it remains adept at packaging and promoting its work. The cause for The Post’s decline instead largely resides with the audience’s relationship with news. The 500,000 Post subscribers who dropped their subscriptions in 2022, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, no longer saw the news with the same interest as in prior years. Simultaneously, when that marginal audience did want to scan the headlines, they had numerous, cost-free methods to do so. Why pay for something you don’t want? And even when you do want it, why pay when you can get it for free?

News fatigue is real, bruh. (Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash)

While Trump’s departure from the White House certainly contributed to the decline in readership, we saw another related cause: News fatigue is real. There are only so many times a reader can digest stories about the world burning down before they are, themselves, burned out. Virtually every audience survey we saw at The Post since 2021, particularly around young readers, cited readers tiring of the same, largely depressing, stories of tragedy or failed political leadership. Instead, they wanted something (anything!) that wasn’t news. (We’ll save the stories about those efforts at The Post for a different day.)

And so here we return to the eye-rolling responses in the Politico story about how The Post should solve declining readership by further leaning into political coverage and accountability journalism. It would be a justifiable move, playing to the institution’s strengths. It would also be the wrong one.

This is not to say that The Post shouldn’t emphasize accountability journalism, nor that its political coverage isn’t a key part of its future success. But focusing on those areas isn’t likely to lead to another readership spike or deliver financial salvation. The Post already has the audience looking for those elements. Slapping a sticker onto WashingtonPost.com that says “NOW WITH 110% MORE RIGOR!” isn’t going to drum up a bunch of new subscribers. There is no new ground to gain.

Committing more resources to traditional news coverage would also totally disregard the message the audience is sending to The Post and other media companies. It would make the problem worse by creating more overhead without driving more revenue.

The only way for The Post, or any media company, to properly address declining revenue and readership is to better attune their product to what the audience wants in 2024. That will require wrestling with some big, but essential, questions. Fortunately, they fall into a framework that all journalists will find familiar:

• Who is your audience? Understanding who is consuming your content and who may potentially consume it, given the opportunity

• What do users want? What types of content will readers pay for or attract advertiser interest?

• When do they want it? How can you align production and publication with user routines and schedules?

• Where do they want it? What’s a user’s preferred platform to consume content?

• Why do they want it? What’s the reason for them to engage with you instead of some other provider?

• How do they want it? Addressing the tone of the content in addition to some of the other questions above

Over the course of this newsletter, I’ll examine some methods to answer each of these questions, pulling from some of the success stories I’ve seen both during my time at ESPN and The Post, as well as what I’ve seen or enjoyed elsewhere as an audience member. There is no doubt the immediate outlook for the news industry is a bit gloomy, but some creative, audience-first thinking can absolutely elevate it above the current cloud cover.

Coming Friday: The magical three-letter word that can help save “Capital J” Journalism