The Washington Post’s Leaders Missed the Point

What does it mean to subscribe to something? Whether we mean a belief or a magazine, the definition is complicated. I began subscribing to The New Yorker when I was a sophomore in college; more than 30 years later, I have yet to stop and I feel strongly that I never will. Yet during some of those years—okay, many of them—the weekly issues have piled up in my home and gone mostly unread between biannual days of bingeing and purging. If these reading habits could somehow be converted into digital clicks, the resulting “traffic report” might look like I don’t want the product at all.

Earlier this month, I was one of a great number of people laid off from The Washington Post. Before the past year and a half of staggering self-inflicted wounds—culminating in the firing of hundreds of journalists, including war reporters, arts critics, and the entire Sports and Books sections—the paper had survived and briefly thrived by emphasizing digital subscriptions. This strategy has become essential in the dwindling newspaper industry, given steep declines in revenue from print advertising. I started at the paper in late summer 2022 as the editor of Book World, a section that the Post was re-expanding, restoring a stand-alone print review that had been shut down in 2009. I’d spent 11 wonderful years on the Books desk at The New York Times, and I knew that moving to any other paper at this point in history was a risky proposition, but the chance to bolster general-interest literary coverage in this country was too tempting to pass up.

Within a year or two, my leap of faith seemed to be vindicated: All signs pointed to us gaining (and keeping) readers at Book World. We were publishing more and attracting a bigger audience. We heard regularly from readers, many of whom still sat with the physical Sunday paper; some let us know they were especially loyal to our staff critics and often started scans of the Post by flipping to their work. I feel very passionate about the importance of arts coverage and criticism, but my thoughts about building and maintaining an audience apply just as well to international news, local journalism, and reporting on climate change, other areas that are vital to the mix of any serious newspaper even if the number of clicks on them can be modest.

I’ve sometimes gotten the sense, emanating from the precincts of mass media where grand strategy is handled, that publications believe that their potential audience is the total number of people with an internet connection. This is false not just as reality but even as metaphor. No audience is infinite, or even close (especially a paying audience), and you must choose whom you court to be part of it—and how you court them.

Many discussions of strategy now involve the idea of “meeting readers where they are.” On one level, this is a realistic acknowledgment that, put simply, it’s not 1972. Editors and writers frequently complain that their work isn’t getting placed on the homepage or near the top of an app, and it’s true that even marginally more time in a prominent spot helps boost readership. Other levers are also available. Papers can and very obviously do influence reader behavior, but it’s fashionable among journalism execs to stress reader influence instead. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,” the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, recently said, perfectly encapsulating this view: “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” This philosophy doesn’t merely counsel paying attention to what readers respond to—something any sane 21st-century journalist does; it essentially makes the data your editorial staff.

[Read: The murder of The Washington Post]

I don’t believe in this inevitability. As a reader of many distinctive publications, I want to be led by them. What makes them special is where they choose to take me, and how much I trust them to do that. In a subscription business, you are not just trying to reach new people, crucial as that is; you are also trying to retain those you already have. Sizable, steadfast subscriber bases are hard-won, and keeping them involves the fulfillment of an unspoken contract as well as the actual one that paying readers sign. I expect publications I support to attempt growth without radically changing the focus or quality of the work or pivoting to some get-traffic-quick scheme every time readership dips over a holiday weekend.

Even more important than retaining loyalists, as the Post’s recent history proves, is not deliberately antagonizing them or your own talent. Working at the Post after Bezos nixed its endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 was an almost painfully perfect microcosm of living in America during that time—for managerial as much as political reasons. While the Trump administration placed arrogant agitators in positions of leadership over seasoned professionals, three or four people at the top of the Post made decisions that many of their employees and customers viewed as misguided, actively destructive, or both. Even allowing for the industry headwinds facing the paper and the necessity of painful change, I found it difficult to see what was happening as stewardship, exactly. Over the past year, I’ve far too often had reason to think of the popular meme from The Simpsons in which Principal Skinner wonders if he’s out of touch and concludes: “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” The top brass of the third-biggest newspaper in the country seem to have decided, “No, it’s our readers and journalists who are wrong.”

In the days since the latest and largest disaster at the Post, I have sometimes asked myself (even more loudly than I normally do) if I defend arts criticism simply because it has so enriched and defined my personal and professional life. Maybe I’m in a bubble, conditions have irrevocably changed, and criticism, in the eyes of a mass audience, is dead. Maybe most readers really do feel it’s been satisfactorily replaced by the Tomatometer and Amazon customer reviews and friends on Goodreads. Really, maybe they do.

I don’t think readers are wrong, or that certain trends aren’t real; I think that important guardians of the media often misunderstand them. I’m not someone who stands athwart the internet yelling “Stop!” That would mean getting run over, and I’m not interested in martyring myself or the culture of criticism for the sake of a fully analog past that is not returning. I live online as much as anyone else. Yet I do believe that the subscription model is not just the answer to a revenue problem, but an asset to the work itself—an opportunity to know more about your readers, their commitments, and their curiosities, and to reward them rather than condescend to them or, worse, punish them.