Somehow, I don’t think a new motto is going to save the paper. Recently, Semafor reported:

Washington Post subscribers quit the paper en masse following owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to withhold its endorsement of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris. But the Post’s audience problems extend beyond angry former subscribers.

Over the last four years, web traffic has cratered. According to internal data shared with Semafor in recent weeks, the Post’s daily traffic last year reached a nadir of just a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post had around 22.5 million daily active users. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.

Last year, Washington City Paper noted that the Post had stopped publicly disclosing its traffic numbers in press releases, after a 60% decline in monthly traffic. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Post’s revenue fell from $190 million in 2023 to $174 million last year.

The sad thing about the Washington Post is there is a market for a paper with normie liberal editorial decisions (op-ed and news). It seemed, in 2019-2020, that the Washington Post might move into that niche, but then Busbee came and that ended.

There is an obvious niche for a news organization with an editorial median in the neighborhood of the American Prospect that is ‘partisan’ in the sense they realize the Republican Party as currently configured is not reasonable. It also could offer non-Heritage Foundation and non-centrist critiques of both Democrats and Republicans. Instead, with a sleazebag UK Tory running the Washington Post, it’s just shit decisions all the way down.

I realize, for Bezos, it’s not about the profits–there’s an ideological and sycophantic program involved. But some newspaper should be able to step in and fill the void.