Last month, in the wake of devastating staff cuts, The Washington Post ran a wild story about the theft of some very pricey wine bottles from a restaurant in nearby Virginia, which led to a high-speed car chase.
It was a story so good that The Post already published it once before, a few months back on the front page of the newspaper.
“So nice, they ran it twice,” Marc Fisher, a former Post writer and editor, pointed out on social media.
Much has already been written about the Post’s decision to lay off almost half its newsroom, eliminate its entire sports desk, and get rid of its entire photo staff. In some cases, reporters were fired in the middle of war zones — a stark contrast from just a few years earlier, when owner Jeff Bezos personally flew freed Post Reporter Jason Rezaian home after he was detained in Iran for 18 months.
Clearly, management made a ton of bad decisions in the 13 years Bezos has owned the paper, too many to hash out now (though Bezos’ foolhardy decision to pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute during the 2024 campaign, costing The Post upwards of 375,000 subscribers, has to be near the top).
Instead of harping on the past, I thought it might be more constructive to look to the future and see what kinds of suggestions experts are offering to help The Post regain the luster of its relentless, authoritative coverage of Trump’s first term.
A lot needs to be done. For starters, how about hiring someone to work on The Post’s discoverability and homepage design? For an organization owned by a tech billionaire, The Post (and frankly, lots of media organizations) doesn’t seem to know how to connect readers to stories the way Netflix recommends movies, or Spotify introduces you to music.
Frankly, there are too many things The Post should and could do, especially with the type of resources Bezos can uniquely provide. So, based on industry insiders, former Post employees, and media thinkers, here are three that come to mind.
Donate The Washington Post to a nonprofit
As Bezos dismantles The Post in an uninspiring attempt to turn it into POLITICO or Axios, there’s one path to sustainability staring the billionaire in the face: Donate the newspaper to a nonprofit.
Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, has been making this suggestion since 2024. Even before gutting the newsroom, Bezos was a compromised owner, with numerous political interests, government contracts and a recent need to curry favor with a Trump administration obsessed with anything it perceives as negative news coverage.
“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post,” Bezos himself wrote in an October 2024 op-ed.
A few newspapers have gone the nonprofit path, and the early results are optimistic.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I work, was donated to a charitable trust by former cable TV magnate H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest in 2016. While the paper is owned by a nonprofit, The Inquirer itself remains a for-profit public benefit corporation, so we still have to earn more than we spend. But in the past few years, the business has stabilized, and Publisher Elizabeth Hughes reported not only that The Inquirer was profitable in 2025, but also that the paper posted its first year-over-year revenue growth in over 20 years.
The same goes for The Salt Lake Tribune, which was purchased in 2016 by Paul Huntsman and converted to a nonprofit. After layoffs in 2018, The Tribune has slowly grown and is aiming to remove its paywall entirely in the next few months. While that means giving up $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue, newsroom leaders expect to earn more from increased donations. The paper also expanded into nearby Washington County and was on pace to end the year with profits of around $1 million.
There’s also The Baltimore Banner, a digital startup in Charm City formed as a nonprofit in 2022 by hotel magnate Stewart Bainum. The Banner’s reporting earned a Pulitzer Prize last year for local reporting, and the upstart announced plans to expand into nearby Prince George’s County outside Washington, D.C. More on that in a bit.
Every single one of these owners has a fraction of Bezos’ wealth and resources, who could hand over control and fund a sizable endowment, allowing The Post to thrive for the next century without all the fuzzy conflicts of interest.
Hire back your sports desk and let them innovate
Andrew Marchand, The Athletic’s news-breaking sports media reporter, put it as bluntly and accurately as anyone could last month.
“It’s still kind of crazy The Washington Post doesn’t cover the Commanders,” Marchand wrote on social media.
Washington’s NFL franchise has been among the most significant cultural institutions in the city since it moved south from Boston in 1937 and won its first championship. The team cemented its status across the region with Super Bowl wins in 1982, 1987 and 1991, and dominated the news during the tenure of troubled owner Dan Snyder. These days, the Commanders are only one year removed from appearing in the NFC Championship game and have already had a newsworthy offseason, with most of their coaching staff replaced.
Yet The Post doesn’t have a single reporter covering the team after eliminating its entire sports desk last month.
Coverage of an NFL team tends to be among the most-read content a news organization can produce, especially a franchise as consequential to the region as the Commanders. Given Bezos’ apparent desire to curry favor with the current administration, gutting something as popular and uncontroversial as your newspaper’s sports coverage seems bananas.
You don’t have to tell the editors of the aforementioned Baltimore Banner, who already announced their expansion into Prince George’s County, that it will also include adding beat reporters to cover the Commanders and Washington Nationals, the team’s MLB franchise. The Banner also plans to staff up to cover the city’s other major sports teams.
“Our research and internal data show strong interest in coverage of these teams, and we know that excellent sports journalism drives reader engagement and subscriber retention,” wrote Audrey Cooper, The Banner’s editor-in-chief, noting the addition “benefits our current readers as well as future ones.”
Reconstituting a sports desk doesn’t mean the Post needs a beat reporter for every sport or spend lots of money to send someone to cover the Wizards’ 41 road games. If anything, the comments from former Post sports journalists point to a lack of direction from bosses while still needing to fill a daily print section.
As Sports Columnist Sally Jenkins revealed, The Post’s homepage didn’t even have a tab to their online sports section. “You could get to ‘Well Being.’ But not us,” Jenkins wrote on social media.
This is really the lowest of low-hanging fruit. The fact that it even needs to be suggested is criticism in and of itself.
National politics isn’t the only local news in Washington, D.C.
National politics is local news for The Post, and it should certainly work to own the beat. Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei had some very specific suggestions, including two reporters per federal agency, two per each of the top local business sectors, and “government-wide specialists in federal rulemaking and contracting and spending.”
But The Post’s plan to abandon metro coverage to jump all-in on national politics in a well-saturated market seems about 20 years too late. It’s easy to forget that before Bezos purchased the paper, The Post was more a regional powerhouse than a national paper of record, sharing more DNA with outlets like The Inquirer and The Boston Globe. Before “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the paper’s motto was “For and about Washington.”
Instead of focusing so single-mindedly on coverage of the federal government, I would rehire most of the city desk employees laid off (along with the photo desk) and work to rebuild coverage of Washington, D.C., itself, from the city council to the metro to the suburbs. There’s a reason Washington City Paper owner and Commanders Co-owner Mark Ein offered to buy both The Post’s sports and local sections, according to The Verge’s Tina Nguyen.
“There is now a massive hole in our community that needs to be filled,” Ein wrote on social media. “I’m on it!”
Count blogger and former Vox Co-founder Matt Yglesias among those who would be willing to pay to read more robust coverage of local issues in Washington, D.C. and its suburbs.
“I think this region needs both more routine coverage of our core government institutions and also more analytic coverage to help contextualize things,” Yglesias wrote. “How does our tax and spending situation compare nationally? What are we getting? Where does it go?”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. You can reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here