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June 1, 1933:, the beginning of the beginning: Eugene Meyer wins the auction, buys The Washington Post

The scumbags finally struck today, officially, though they’ve been up to their scumbaggery for years. They’ve finally killed The Washington Post two years after beginning to systematically bleed it of its dignity and its moral authority.

Technically the paper will still exist, but in a ruthlessly skinny form that will turn it into a tragic joke.

There were two proximate causes, in the end:

The first was jaw-dropping incompetence — both professional and financial — by a management team led by British CEO Will Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch protege whose main accomplishment, to date, had been getting implicated in covering up the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London.

The second reason was the greed of a new owner of incomprehensible wealth who viewed the newspaper not as a national trust — he simply had no background in or love for journalism, no understanding of how it is literally vital to democracy — but as a business challenge, as with any other business. In this case, in the end, when his business model failed, it was a business to be milked and repurposed to fit whatever his transitory needs were, using it to increase his wealth and influence by sucking up to a malevolent power his newspaper was morally obliged to challenge. He betrayed his newspaper, and his country. And you.

Hundreds of excellent journalists lost their jobs today. They found out in this eerie way:

Will Lewis and his deputies stiffly informed the staff of these devastating cuts at 8:30 this morning via Zoom, and told them to await individual yes-no emails in the next 30 minutes. So people sat at home, at their computers, refreshing the screen again and again, to find out if they still had an income, while simultaneously sharing their anger and terrors with a private newspaper chat group. Two writers reported they got the shaft while breastfeeding their newborns, dripping tears onto their faces. Someone included contacts for suicide prevention.

Even after two years of dreadful retrenchment and major mismanagement — two years where dozens and dozens of the paper’s topmost talent fled for more secure jobs in more welcoming and honorable venues—the newspaper had been able to gamely hold on as a good, credible product, largely through the skills and determination and guts of a slimmer but still talented, overworked staff. This will not be possible anymore.

The savagery? Here:

The sports section is obliterated.

Book reviews are gone, as is Ron Charles, one of the best book reviewers extant. Pop music criticism is dead. Theater reviews are gone.

International news coverage will be drastically diminished. Many foreign bureaus will be closed. All Middle-East experts, and their editors, are gone.

Photography will be slashed. Page designers, slashed.

Local news is, somehow, going to be expanded while firing a whole bunch of local reporters. My translation: You’ll be reading a whole lot of voiceless, soulless, atonal AI crap. It’s cheap labor, no medical benefits needed.

And so forth.

I remember a moment shortly after I joined the paper as an editor in Style in 1990. At the Miami Herald, I’d developed a reputation for being something of a bomb-thrower. So it surprised me when the paper’s executive editor invited me — a newcomer, a smart-ass carpetbagger — to speak at a yearly retreat the editors used to hold. The subject of the speech was, basically, how is the paper doing?

I obliged. I delivered an hour long slide show — quite funny but deeply snarky and cynical and ruthlessly fault-finding. I concluded, in the end, that The Post was as boring as a box of socks.

I sat down to considerably less applause than I had hoped for. And as I squirmed in my chair, marinating in unease, a guy came and set down next to me. “That was great,” he said. “You are very funny. “ He enunciated every word in syrupy slow motion: “That.” “Was.” “Great”. “You” “Are…”.

I am bad with faces. But I recognized the cadences, from TV. This was Bob Woodward.

Bob told me that this was a newspaper that thought deeply about itself, and that yes, they were stuffy and hidebound. But he predicted that I would find, in the end, that they value truth spoken to power, and guts and gumption and creativity. They didn’t always acknowlege it outright — that would be unseemly, Bob said — but they really want bomb-throwers; they accommodate them and give them room to breathe.

That’s the thing about the Post back then, and until the relatively recent past. All of what Bob said proved true. The Washington Post may have been stodgy — that comes with being an important corporate citizen, a paper of record — but it fought against that constantly, which kept it invigorated, intellectually daring, fun. A fine place that good people wanted to work for, and feel nurtured. The Post was a magnificent variegated voice for its readers to read and love.

God, it was a great newspaper.

That’s it for today. I’ll write more about this soon, when I can summon sufficient anger again. Right now I am just so very, very sad.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Here’s a Go Fund Me for the good people who were laid off today.

(I’ll spare you any other begging for alms. Just for today, though.)