The decision by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, to cut the news organization by one-third has sent ripples through the media landscape. While many have speculated why one of the wealthiest men in the world would take such a drastic step, Thomas Patterson, Harvard Kennedy School’s Bradley Professor of Government and the Press, sees the decision as a business one, addressing a financial problem that has plagued traditional media since the inception of the internet.
We spoke to Patterson to learn what this means for journalistic integrity, public trust in the media, and the first amendment.
Q: What does this downsizing signal about the economic sustainability of major news organizations today?
All of our major newspapers, maybe with the exception of the New York Times, are in trouble. It didn’t happen overnight. This has been going on for a couple of decades where we’ve been losing newspapers for understandable reasons. The first thing to go was their classified ads. Craigslist captured that. And then when the internet comes along, a lot of advertisers, especially the national advertisers, had no good reason to spend heavily on local ads.
We also have seen local businesses set up their own websites and publicize themselves. So, this flow of revenue has been going out the door for a quarter century and picking up casualties along the way. The Washington Post is but the most recent and certainly the most visible.
But the Post is still open. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette closed within the last month. The Post isn’t doing that, but it downsized a third of its reporting staff, which is a major blow to the flow of information coming from traditional news outlets.
Q: How does the loss of these experienced journalists affect the coverage of local, national, and global issues?
In some ways, we’ve got redundancy when it comes to national and international news. The Washington Post isn’t the only player in that category and hasn’t been, in fact, the most important player in that group. But, when you close foreign bureaus, your bureau in Ukraine for example, you’re getting less news about what’s happening on the ground there. And that hurts, no question about it.
I think where it hurts the most is in the Metro coverage, the local coverage. If we go back 50 years to the Watergate scandal and [reporters Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, they were at the Metro desk. They weren’t on the national desk. Sometimes those stories have had national implications, and the Washington Post has been the go-to place for that kind of coverage.
That’s where the real loss is in this downsize. They cut the sports department. For sports fans, that’s a killer, but ESPN has got robust coverage. And you take a football team like the Washington Commanders; they have their own website. Sports fans aren’t going to be left in the dark, but there is a loss, and I think it’s primarily around the Metro desk.
Q: In what ways could the staff reductions at the Post influence the public trust in traditional media?
I don’t think it has much impact. Trust in the media has been in decline for 50 years, not entirely because of what the media have been doing, but they’ve been under attack primarily from the right for five decades. If you look at the polls, who trusts the media and who doesn’t trust the traditional media, it divides very sharply along party lines. I don’t think you’re going to recapture trust in the traditional form very easily, given that it's become a partisan issue.
All of these things undermine the capacity of the traditional media to cover politics, public affairs, current events, and somewhere in that flow of information, you do have a trust factor. I don’t think it’s as immediate as journalists would like to think. They think if they really adhere to accuracy, if they’re transparent about their sources and the like, that suddenly trust will reappear.
The dynamics around trust are much deeper than that and more enduring, and I don’t think this particular development will change that. Trust depends on where you sit.
Q: To what extent do you think this downsizing creates opportunities for partisan or less rigorous outlets to shape a political dialogue?
What we’ve seen in terms of audience behavior is that Americans have increasingly preferred news that fits with what they’d like to believe. Traditional media, newspapers, broadcast networks, and so on, have been losing audiences to partisan outlets, pretty steadily for the last 25 years. People are inclined to head for a particular outlet that’s going to give them comfort and tell them they’re the good guys and the other side are the bad guys. That’s what we’ve seen on the audience side.
Because of this decision, the Post probably will lose some support. It did lose support when Bezos withdrew the endorsement of Kamala Harris right before the 2024 presidential election. A number of its subscribers quit the paper. The Post itself may suffer some loss of its audience, but I don’t think this has national implications.
“I think where it hurts the most is in the Metro coverage, the local coverage. Woodward and Bernstein were at the Metro desk. Sometimes those stories have had national implications”.
Q: What can the Post and similar outlets adopt to maintain journalistic standards while they work through these financial pressures?
They’re all working at it, and there are some things that can be done.
One is to increasingly partner with other news organizations, even nonprofits, to put more reporting muscle into some of these large issues that require a lot of footwork and sometimes a huge amount of data analysis. We’ve seen that with traditional news outlets like ProPublica, for example. Where news outlets at one time have a state reporter permanently at the state capital, increasingly they’re using a pooled arrangement where there will be a reporter there, but that reporter will be used in multiple news outlets.
Another is using artificial intelligence, which is both good and bad for traditional news outlets. If you think about the newsroom, especially at these large news outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe here locally, a lot of their staff are in the research category rather than in the reporting category. They’re assisting in the reporting of news by providing background research that the reporters need.
AI is a wonderful research assistant. We’re finding that out here at HKS, but it’s also true in the newsroom. Because of AI, you can do as much as you are doing with fewer people. Now, I don’t think you can hack a third of your journalism staff and send them out the door and replace that with AI. But there are some efficiencies in that category.
But the long-term challenge for news outlets is really the business model. The Washington Post was losing money, and that’s at least the prima facie justification for the cuts, but it’s the reality as well.
And It’s not just closures. A lot of newspapers have really cut back on their coverage and shrunk the number of pages and, with that, the amount of news they’re providing to the local community.
The problem for local public radio—which has exactly the right kind of attitude; a civic attitude toward covering their communities—is that they don’t have much money. More than half have a staff of fewer than 10, and it got worse when Congress cut funding for public media. And then you look at local television news: They have survived the changes better than either newspapers or public radio. They’re in pretty good financial shape, but their model is one of attracting rather than informing viewers. The real challenge is how you can both attract and inform at the same time.
It’s not going to stop with The Washington Post. Over the next 20 years, we’re going to see a lot of closures.
Q: As you said, there has been a 50-year decline in traditional newspapers. Do you think what has happened at the Post is a continuation of this trend, or do you think there’s something more?
Well, I could speculate on that, and certainly there are plenty of people speculating on that. Jeff Bezos runs an empire, not just the Post. And the most important part, the pillar of that enterprise, is Amazon, and it’s a platform. The platforms are fighting tooth and nail to not be regulated and curry favor in Washington for that purpose.
It may well be that that was part of Bezos’ thinking. We’ve seen all of the platforms in some ways step up with money and adulation to the current administration. Politics may well be part of it, but it’s also the case that the Post is a money loser, and Bezos is a businessperson. You could treat this strictly as a business decision, and maybe that’s what it is.
In terms of these other newspapers that we’ve seen around the country closing down or shrinking their coverage, those have been business decisions.
Q: Are we in danger of losing the First Amendment?
I don’t think so. Whatever one might think of the Supreme Court and the lower courts, the one area where they’ve been steadfast in terms of upholding the Constitution, is protecting free speech, press freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and so on. As long as the courts hold and we don’t see a fundamental change in precedent at the level of our judiciary, I don’t think the First Amendment is endangered.
Now, there’s different ways of looking at the First Amendment. One is purely legal; what I am referring to with the courts. But the First Amendment also is something in practice, and that speaks more to people’s willingness to speak out.
You can have a chilling effect even if the First Amendment is steadfast and protecting your right to free speech. If you think you’re going to run into trouble speaking up, then you’re not going to speak up as often.
I think that’s more of the danger than a change in the legal doctrine.
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Banner photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; portrait by Martha Stewart