The Washington Post Missed The Digital Revolution -- Now It's Facing the Guillotine

Ruben Navarrette
Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:30:37 -0800
Opinion

SAN DIEGO — My wife is the brains of the operation, and so it's rare that she asks a question with an obvious answer.

"Why did they lay off so many people at The Washington Post?" she asked recently. I worked for the Post for 24 years as part of the now shuttered Washington Post Writers Group. So my wife knew I'd have an opinion on the subject that I planned to write up later and send off to my new syndicate. She wanted a free sample.

"Honey, why do you think?" I asked.
Updated: Thu Feb 12, 2026

SAN DIEGO — My wife is the brains of the operation, and so it's rare that she asks a question with an obvious answer.

"Why did they lay off so many people at The Washington Post?" she asked recently. I worked for the Post for 24 years as part of the now shuttered Washington Post Writers Group. So my wife knew I'd have an opinion on the subject that I planned to write up later and send off to my new syndicate. She wanted a free sample.

"Honey, why do you think?" I asked.

Here's a tip: Answering a question with a question rarely works out well in marriage. And I've been married almost as long as I was at the Post.

"It's a newspaper," I continued. "Generation Z — including our kids — don't read newspapers. Two papers die every week. Not because of neglect, or lack of talent or bad journalism. But because of innovation. People are busy and they're getting their news on the run. You either keep up with them, or you get left behind. The Post got left behind."

Here's the headline: On Feb. 4, The Washington Post began mass layoffs that some consider a death knell for a storied institution that is nearly 150 years old.

Roughly 300 newsroom employees lost their jobs, or about 38% of the 790 people who worked in the newsroom before the layoffs. The newly unemployed include many from the sports department, foreign bureaus and local and metro desks. More cuts are likely.

Given that the newspaper is losing more than $100 million annually, publisher Will Lewis appeared to have settled on the shortsighted strategy of trying to keep the house warm through winter by burning the furniture.

Will it work? Lewis won't be around to find out. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who bought the Post for $250 million — which is roughly what Bezos earns in two or three days, according to financial news sites — recently did to Lewis what Lewis had done to all those journalists. Bezos fired him. Karma gets the last word.

Unless Lewis did exactly the job that he was hired to do, gutting the newspaper to get it ready to go to market. Bezos could be gearing up to sell it — although, in its current state, it's hard to imagine anyone would want to buy it at anything but a bargain price. It's a humiliating fate for a newspaper that deserved better.

It's been more than a week since the first swing of the ax, and media observers are still writing obituaries. "The Murder of the Washington Post" screamed the headline of a story by Ashley Parker in The Atlantic.

Any calamity offers lessons. Unfortunately, commentators are drawing the wrong lessons from this one.

In speaking with my wife, I was right to frame what is happening at the Post in the context of the chaos currently enveloping other newspapers in the United States. In the past two decades, more than a quarter of U.S. newspapers have stopped the presses.

Where I went wrong was in not making clear that this chaos isn't limited to newspapers. These days, it also extends to other forms of what is often referred to derisively as "old media" — with similar results.

The partisans don't understand what's happening. Liberals see a conservative media outlet failing, and they assume no one is buying what the right-wing is selling. When a liberal media company fails, conservatives draw the same conclusion in reverse.

This isn't about ideology. It's about technology. Radio, television and magazines have all fallen on hard times now that more people are consuming their news and information in different ways and from a whole new galaxy of sources.

Talk radio is being devoured by podcasts. Television is giving way to streaming. Magazines have been replaced by newsletters, online sites and video hubs like TikTok.

The real enemy is the demand on our time. On Sundays, people used to lounge around all day and read one section after another of The New York Times — where the weekend edition was three inches thick. No one has time for that anymore. Today, we read snippets on our phones as we're waiting for the barista from Generation Z to call out our name and give us our coffee.

This is all bad news for the news business. The economics don't pencil out. The fact that many consumers now get their content "on demand" bedevils the poor souls in the sales department who try to convince advertisers they can still reach consumers — if only they can catch them first.

The Washington Post hasn't even laced up its sneakers.