Chairs and Tabled
Every five-year old knows what happens when the music stops.
The Washington Post announced layoffs today. They shuttered their sports section. They closed bureaus in Delhi, Europe, and throughout the Middle East. My timeline is filled with sad posts from sad now-former Posters.
There are all sorts of fingers pointing in all sorts of directions. You’d think with that much blame someone would get it right. OK, not the Nelson Muntzes of social media who piss their “HA HA!” opinions like a drunk peeing on the side of parked police cruiser.
You’d hope that the experts anointed by news for their expertise would get it right. Like, say, Max Tani who covers news media for news media. He regurgitated the regrets of Marty Baron who used to run the Post. He—like everyone other than me—forgot to mention Baron’s comments from two summers ago when he said,
“The situation at the Post is they invested heavily in hiring a lot of staff. They way over-expanded at a time that digital advertising was collapsing. So that was a problem.”
The critic in me would say Marty didn’t forget the statement. He ignored it. Conveniently. Because it didn’t fit his narrative: the problems at the Post start with existential and work inward.
- Search traffic is down 50% in three years (external)
- Daily story output has fallen dramatically (internal)
- We write from one perspective (very internal)
Yeah, whatever. Search is down that much everywhere. Story output is way down. Unique story output is nearly zero. And yah, you write from one perspective. None of that is the story. They’re just bullets.
Post after post from laid-off Post reporters and bureau chiefs lament the loss of news. Which is—of course—nonsense.
I’m going to borrow Marty’s adverb here—“way.” We have *way* more news than ever before.
The problem isn’t narrative, or search, or output, or leaning. It’s time. It’s time for *this* version of the news business to die.
Paul Reuter started it in 1851. You read that right, 18.
175 years ago, you couldn’t get news from far-flung places in reasonable time. Because relying on homing pigeons was folly. Paul realized that the telegraph was better. True story. So, Paul started a system that collected news from all over the place so we could all read it. The news agency you know as Reuters was first to report on Lincoln’s assassination… in Europe.
As recently as when WaPo’s reporters woke up this morning, they hadn’t realized that the internet is better, faster, and more reliable than the telegraph. The Washington Post doesn’t need to be in Delhi or Europe or throughout the Middle East. We get *way* more news from there than we need. There’s that word again.
The only reason from the WASHINGTON Post to report the story in a uniquely new way. Unique I learned long ago from a real writer runs without a modifier. It’s either unique or it ain’t.
The Post isn’t unique. Not unique from the Times of New York or the Times of London or the Times of Los Angeles. We can get stories from all of those places in real-time. And from so many independent sources and bloggers and Substackers and…
So what really happened? There’s a finite number of chairs for news.
Every five-year old knows what happens when the music stops.
You better find a seat.
Your own unique seat.
The Post doesn’t have one anymore.
Not for far-flung news and not for local sports.
Today, the music stopped. And the Post’s chair is filled. By the New York Times.
