WaPo’s Plan to Save Themselves: Storytelling for All of America

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About 400 hundred Washington Post staffers are begging Jeff Bezos to step in and possibly save them from WaPo’s imminent death and consequent layoffs.

Allegedly, they have lost 90% of their readership.

The Post now has a new mission. Their mission is to tell riveting stories for all of America, not just the far-left.

This week, as Mr. Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, the newspaper debuted a mission statement that evokes a more expansive view of The Post’s journalism, without death or darkness: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The statement is meant to be an internal rallying point for employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. Executives are not planning to replace its more strident public slogan. Suzi Watford, The Post’s chief strategy officer, has been previewing it to some employees this week…

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has made comments in line with the new mission statement in conversations with Post journalists in recent years, according to two people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Bezos has expressed hopes that The Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, the people said.

They say they plan to “reach all America.” We’ll see.

Uh, Oh, the newspaper wants to reach firefighters and conservatives. That’s probably why Jennifer Rubin took off to form her own website. It means fewer leftists and some on the right will take their places.

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has made comments in line with the new mission statement in conversations with Post journalists in recent years, according to two people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Bezos has expressed hopes that The Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, the people said.

For starters, WaPo wants to reach 200 million people, and it’s not looking good.

Most publications in The Washington Post’s peer group fall well short of reaching 200 million people, according to data from the analytics firm Comscore. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Axios, and Politico all generated fewer than 100 million monthly total viewers for the first half of 2024, paying and non-paying, though they saw an audience spike around the presidential election.

This hits the problem at its core:

The slide deck [Powerpoint presentation] includes a list of seven principles first articulated by Eugene Meyer, an influential Post owner, in 1935. Among them: “the newspaper shall tell all the truth” and “the newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.”

The problem is they will likely still lie by omission since their staff is almost 100% left-wing or very left-wing.

Their slogan will remain: Democracy Dies in Darkness. And they should know about that since their paper is dying because it wallows in darkness.

They want us back, America. They are trying something new.


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