Everyone Has Advice for Jeff Bezos. Is He Listening? | Analysis
Jeff Bezos isn’t talking about the future of The Washington Post — but everyone else is.
In the wake of Wednesday’s brutal layoffs of one third of the staff, former Post reporter and Axios CEO Jim VandeHei suggested that Bezos, “disinterested, disengaged” and “distracted,” should consider selling the paper to a more committed steward, floating names like Michael Bloomberg or tech journalist Kara Swisher, another Post alumnus.
Former Post managing editor Cameron Barr was even more blunt: “Bezos lacks the courage and resolve to lead one of the great institutions in American journalism.”
Sources close to Bezos told TheWrap that the owner isn’t selling the paper and believes he’s saving it. Executive Editor Matt Murray has suggested as much, telling CNN that Bezos “wants the Post to be a bigger, relevant, thriving institution.”
But Bezos’ silence on Wednesday as the paper laid off more than 300 journalists, and in the weeks leading up to the cuts as staffers publicly pleaded with him to preserve the newsroom, has invited speculation that he isn’t committed to the paper.
It’s not only Bezos missing from the rolling conversation about the Post’s future, but also the paper’s embattled CEO, Will Lewis, who was conspicuously absent in breaking the news to staff. In the midst of this leadership vacuum, journalists, news executives and media watchers are filling the void to assess what went wrong at the Post — and how it should move forward.
VandeHei, who left the Post’s political desk in 2006 to co-found Politico, and later co-founded Axios, suggested in a second post where to deploy reporters in Washington, what to acquire (Punchbowl), who to hire (Punchbowl’s Anna Palmer, The Information’s Jessica Lessin, the New York Times’ Peter Baker), and which Post veterans to seek out for guidance (Marty Baron, Bob Woodward, David Ignatius).
The Axios chief’s proposal has an element of fantasy sports to it, but it speaks to a level of ambition that’s not being publicly articulated by the Post’s owner or chief executive. It was Murray who addressed the Post’s “strategic reset” on a staff Zoom call, relaying the brutal cuts to foreign, sports, metro and books. Murray told Fox News that Lewis “had a lot of things to tend to” on Wednesday. Lewis was spotted in San Francisco on Thursday at an NFL Honors event ahead of the Super Bowl.
Management have come under withering scrutiny for their stewardship of the Post in recent years, from driving away hundreds of thousands of subscribers by abruptly spiking the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris to reorienting the opinion pages to Lewis’ “third newsroom” debacle and other missteps. The Post reportedly lost $100 million in 2024, and a knowledgeable individual told TheWrap that the paper lost up to $125 million last year.
“To state the obvious, there’s no reason to be sympathetic to Bezos or any of the other leaders there,” said Nate Silver. “The paper’s influence really cratered following the editorial shifts in 2024/25.
Swisher wrote on Threads that Bezos “installed an incompetent exec, made a series of dumb decisions and sucked up to Trump to make another filthy dollar,” while noting that the owner and CEO “were not even present for the execution despite their obvious culpability in dragging the news org into the trash heap.”
Swisher tried to put together a bid for the Post in 2024, but Bezos didn’t engage. She told TheWrap that “when she was interested, a lot of the great staff that has since left was there,” but Bezos has “kneecapped” the paper. Asked on Thursday whether she was still interested, she told TheWrap: “It is not for sale, at least to me.”
The sweeping cuts have not only put Lewis’ tumultuous two-year tenure under a microscope, but also renewed questions about where the Post blundered before Bezos acquired it from the Graham family in 2013. As I noted Wednesday, Bezos was seen by many as a newsroom savior following a series of cuts and buyouts, and he invested heavily in the paper.
“The original, pre-Bezos sin,” said Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, was the Post turning down VandeHei and then-politics editor John Harris’ pitch to launch a politics site attached to the paper before decamping for Politico.
Smith, a former Politico reporter, added that the Post “sneer[ed] as Politico and its descendants built businesses that are, not coincidentally, on the order of magnitude of the $100 million a year the Post is losing.” (Punchbowl’s co-founders also cut their teeth at Politico; one of them, Jake Sherman, tamped down speculation by noting his site is not for sale.)
Jordan Weissmann, editorial director at the Progressive Policy Institute, ran through several other missed opportunities, such as failing to launch a high-end, revenue-driving subscription service like Politico Pro years back and letting Ezra Klein walk out the door to build Vox.
“Striking that three companies — Politico, Axios and Vox all came out of the Post,” said New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen. “You could easily see their business thriving within a diversified Post.”
While Bezos has been widely condemned by journalists for this week’s newsroom bloodbath, especially among Post alumni, he has some defenders. Katherine Boyle, a former Post reporter, wrote that Bezos arrived as the paper was retrenching and “gave the newsroom a blank check for over a decade.”
“The Post can still own politics, and every story, feature and reporter should be focused on covering it,” Boyle wrote. “But it needs to stop pretending that the world didn’t change 20 years ago and start listening to its readers again. There are solid media companies being built for the future and the Post can become one of them. But the old Post died many decades ago. Pretending Bezos killed it isn’t true.”
Sally Jenkins, a renowned sportswriter who took a buyout from the Post in 2025 after three decades at the paper, shot back that Boyle hasn’t been in the newsroom for some time. “Two straight publishers squandered all the largesse,” Jenkins wrote, adding: “We HATED wasting Bezos money, could SEE biz side fail to form a coherent strategy and fall behind in innovation and consumer habit. We were left to brainstorm in clusters [with] no leadership.”
The debate on the Post’s future continues raging on social media, evident in NiemanLab compiling a list Thursday of “37+ things The Washington Post did wrong and 22+ things they could do to fix it.”
And yet the most consequential voice in all of this has yet to be heard.
Sharon Waxman and Corbin Bolies contributed reporting.
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