State of Thursday: FIRED REPORTERS ARE CRYING AGAIN
All these people think so highly of themselves
Greetings, Dear Reader,
Here we are yet again, and yet again, it’s a parade of totally ignorant tears.
Let’s get into it.
FIRED REPORTERS ARE CRYING AGAIN
The Washington Post fired 30% of its staff yesterday, a total of ~300 reporters and editors.
Let’s address a few things straight away. This analysis is completely shoot-from-the-hip. I don’t really have the time to dig into statistics, traffic reports, or do a comprehensive review of the articles associated with these layoffs.
I will include some stats, but this is hardly going to be an empirical two cents, Dear Reader.
You can take my word as a guy who has followed media closely for 25 years, or you can leave it. I’m also not much into grave dancing. You can gloat and dance if you’d like, I won’t judge, but being laid off sucks, and I don’t wish it on anyone.
One of the first things you can do when one of these mass layoffs occurs at a media company — which happens rather routinely — is check author pages, production and beats.
Did WaPo really need to pay 13 salaries in the “climate change” beat? Was the output of WaPo’s various “race reporters” really putting the business in the, ahem, black? Why on earth is their sports section, which was almost entirely nuked, leading Super Bowl week with a giant cover story on Excel spreadsheets?
Style Section Editor Jada Yuan was let go. She wrote 13 headlines in all of January, which is a lot for Post staff, but still well short of economically viable. Among them were a handful of listicles of the sort that went out of fashion, pun intended, 15 years ago — “9 Reasons” everyone’s “talking about” Netflix’s gay hockey show, and “10 Looks” on the red carpet. She did write a piece on the Wu-Tang Clan’s “most expensive” album that I might have read, but certainly would never pay to read. I highly doubt the audience for Wu-Tang content is routinely reading the Post or subbed to Yuan’s author page.
Beneath a long and whiny video she posted of herself crying into her cell phone — a style of content that is quite popular among liberals these days — an anon pro-Trump user posted simply: “Lear to code.”
“As soon as you learn to spell,” Yuan replied, apparently missing the double entendre.
The response also betrayed the fact that an editor at the Post doesn’t have a baseline comprehension of current events. Nick Shirley’s reporting on the “Quality Learing Center” set off a massive firestorm in the United States. You should get the joke, Yuan.
On the aforementioned gay hockey show Netflix produced, which basically everyone who’s normal hates — it was apparently inspired by one fired WaPo reporter’s work.
So not only is your unreadable, uninteresting and very gay sports slop dragging down the section (now 95% laid off) and the paper, but it’s leading to the production of unwatchable gay sports slop on Netflix.
Do you see where I’m headed here, Dear Reader?
Reporters are famously oblivious to how the business actually works, and then when they get laid off, they act utterly sanctimonious.
Well, I guess leadership doesn’t value our fight against climate change! they shout into social media. I guess Jeff Bezos doesn’t value beat listicles and gay race stuff!
At least Axios’s Mike Allen demonstrated some awareness.
“Continued success at rival papers, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, suggests the Post’s challenges are self-inflicted,” he wrote.
(Let’s be honest, WSJ never went fully woke and people sub to the NYT mostly for games, recipes and The Athletic, an actually good sports outlet.)
The self-infliction of this wound is much higher than usual in this case too. It wasn’t just a matter of prioritizing beats and angles wider audiences no longer cared to read. Washington Post staff went absolutely haywire at least three times in recent memory. First, when Bezos pulled the endorsement of Kamala Harris, and then again when he pledged to make the Opinion section a bit more right of center.
These tantrums led to hundreds of snipey tweets from current and former employees. Scores leaked anonymous hatred for leadership to competing publications. Some flat out said paying customers should stop subscribing. And they did! The Washington Post lost 90-some million in ‘23, and another $100 million in ‘24.
Not only did revenue crater, but so did readership. They went from a high of 144 million readers to just 21 million in a span of four years.
Sure, given the Post’s previous commitment to all things gay, race and communist, a little of this was “go woke go broke.” But one thing you never, ever do in this business is explicitly tell people to stop reading.
The third notable freakout was when the new executive editor, Will Lewis, was brought aboard from the Telegraph. Staff revolted. They demanded to know if any black women were considered. (I hear Claudine Gay is looking for C-level employment.)
As you can imagine, Dear Reader, exactly none of this is productive for bottom lines.
Perhaps the most insufferable thing about media layoffs is that all these people think so highly of themselves. They set up a GoFundMe and ask for Venmo donations for “beers.”
I know it’s hard to think of anyone but yourself when you’re suddenly out of a job, but 1.3 million people were laid off last year in the US.
Bezos’s other property, Amazon, laid off 16,000 people yesterday. Any tears for them at the Post?
That’s it for the free portion of today’s State of the Day.
The full subscriber edition continues below with my forbidden takes.