I'm a lifetime Post subscriber and have been at my wits end with it for a few years, so would love to see a major shake-up, but, I agree, making changes based on how many Friday meetings there are is .... not inspiring. On the WFH thing, though, I DO think that the fact so many Post reporters have not come back to the office is likely reflected in the WAY they write about, for example, COVID or cultural trends. The tone reflects a highly neurotic, anxious personality whose views are extrapolated to represent the world at large. Inaccurately.
I'm at the point where I'm *extremely thankful* that we were back in the office full-time by June of 2020, lest I might have fallen victim to the very apparent locked-in neuroses.
I disagree. I'm 45, so right on the cusp between Gen X and Millenials, and the latter's desire to continue working from home (almost neurotically obsessed with it) has nothing to do with Covid. I know people who have quit jobs in healthcare (healthcare! A face-to-face business if ever there was one) purely because they couldn't work from home. It has much more to do with flexibility and not feeling constrained by office relationships and expectations than it has to do with Covid. Covid simply showed what was possible; then they ran with it. I can't speak for the folks at the Post, but I suspect it's the same. I would bet my paycheck those same people are still going out to restaurants, and bar, and shows, and hanging with friends. It's not Covid keeping them working from home.
One thing that really bugs me about the NYT is that the tone & scope of the their foreign-affairs coverage, except when it comes to major crises like the Ukraine war.
If you read the Times, you will not get a reliable picture of what is going on in the politics of any major European country, or even Mexico or Canada. If you read the Economist, you will. The Economist is at least as slanted as the Times, but they try to inform you about the foreign country. The Times does quaint human interest stories and points to controversies abroad which resemble American culture war battles. (Or controversies which they make resemble our culture-war battles). Of course that is probably what their readers want.
The Times has the best coverage of US foreign policy, but I agree can be more miss than hit about other countries internal issues (personally think coverage of UK, China, Japan are ok).
Not as sure about the Economist. I once thought of them as having interesting and extremely comprehensive coverage of many countries. The glaring exception was the USA, where I thought their coverage of America was always just wildly off. But then I moved overseas and I also felt like their coverage of the new country was also just as bad. I trust them much less now.
I don't *trust* the Economist at all, but they tell you who is in the running to be PM of Italy or President of Chile or something like that and you can try to discount for their biases.
You can also do that for the Times on American politics (and American *foreign policy,* you are right to say they're very informative on that subject). You can't do that for the Times on Europe (or Mexico). If all you knew about Mexican politics came from NYT articles about Mexico, you would read some nice stories about wellness resorts (do they pollute?) and heroic female politicians and some grim stories about corruption and narcos, but you wouldn't know anything about Mexico. The Economist gives you a vastly exaggerated anti-AMLO line, but some idea about what the political debate in Mexico is actually about.
Exactly- if you account for the fact that the Economist is pro-liberal democracy (liberal in the economic sense), then you know their bias and can read between the lines. I’ve found their coverage very informative, even if I roll my eyes every now and again (which is far less frequent than other publications).
This article jives well with the news that Dave Weigel is jumping ship. He puts out a unique and very interesting product and the way they treated him with that suspension was absurd. The post needs to realize that it's business is good media content and not the kind that comes from staff disputes.
He seems like a writer with too much personality to cover politics for a national newspaper - Haberman at the Times is at least equally good as a reporter but she's right where she belongs, whereas Weigel is at his best writing a semi-edited blog like thing where he can make references atonal jazz and crack the occasional off-color joke.
The WSJ reporting is so exceptional. My dad is not a business person (retired Federal bureaucrat) but he found it to be one of the most reliable sources of news in the last five years, in particular about the early stages of Covid. The NYT shift left does nothing for him (he used to read David Brooks, but no one else there), and he doesn’t care about the side businesses. He’s thinks the WSJ opinion section is obviously noxious, but he doesn’t see it as representative of anything else they do.
The WSJ Opinion section today contains an article on Income Equality that, if they did their math properly, is one of the most important public policy articles published in a very long time. Please tell your dad that it pays to read the noxious stuff just to understand all perspectives on an issue.
which was written by the guy who co-wrote the bill that ended Glass-Steagall and who currently writes for the AEI. Sorry, but the Times and the Post employ opinion writers to research and report their articles, they don’t outsource them to think tanks whose clear and only agenda is to find reasons to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations using funny math about quintiles and pre-tax income. But hey, I don’t mind, since it saves the WSJ money to do great reporting.
I did not check the math. Did you? The claims are certainly plausible. I look forward to a debate about the ideas rather than the person who wrote about them. But that argument will not be about whether we should or should not look at income after taxes and transfer payments. It will be about how we calculate the amount transfer payments that are received and the distribution of that money within the set of recipients.
What’s funny is that the place of the WSJ as the most respected newspaper predates the Trump era by quite a bit. I knew someone who worked for a major regional paper in 2003 who told me that most of the newspaper industry thought this at the time if they were being honest with themselves. She seemed to indicate that this was a shift in which WSJ had eclipsed the NYT some time over the past decade.
This person had left leaning politics and did not at all care for the editorial page, but was pretty frank about the shared belief that it was an objectively better news reporting organization than the NYT, and worth aspiring to. I kind of wonder if the average person in newspaper journalism would be willing to admit this now.
Enjoyed this piece! You didn’t even mention sports, which the Times clearly sees as an additional “we’re more than our political slant” vertical with the purchase of The Athletic.
I am 100% in agreement with Josh's point that poorly run organizations are really bad at addressing poor performers. Managing employees effectively is difficult, and companies - like people - are drawn to the path of least resistance. So when a company is flying high they just ignore the need to manage people. And then when the organization runs into headwinds, they suddenly "realize" that they have employees with performance issues. It's not rocket science that dealing with poor performers all along would have prevented some of the current trouble.
And the fact that the head of WaPo thought the best way to identify performance issues was to look at meeting schedules is bizarre. If the top leadership is that clueless about assessing and managing performance, no wonder they have a bunch of poor performers still working there.
My first "real" job was in a corporate training department. One of their key metrics of success was time spent in training. The more training employees did, the more successful training was! Even at the age of 21 with no corporate work experience, I knew that was BS. But all that mattered was that it was - as you say - an objective number.
No way I could live with myself supporting such awful behavior from powerful journalists against a nobody for a single mistake the nobody regrets and apologized for.
It almost seems like it’s the old Roman decimation strategy, off every tenth man to get the others in line because things really have gotten that out of control. Seems like they are frustrated trying to manage a newsroom full of undisciplined children and don’t know what to do other than fire some people. This might be step 1 just to get everyone still there to actually address the organizations needs.
I have always subscribed to the Times and my local paper and when the Post was actively trading Trump scoops with the Times after the 2016 election we added a digital subscription to the Post. I read more content in the Times but I am also annoyed by it more as well. I don’t read any of the Post opinion content other than the humorous ones by Alexandra Petri who is sometimes funny. I think Date Lab is a cute idea and it has the appeal of the real estate content in the Times. I consult NYT cooking all the time, play Wordle and Spelling Bee daily, and rely embarrassingly heavily on Wirecutter reviews so it’s true that I would absolutely drop the Post before the Times but I want it to succeed because the smugness of the Times continues to be off putting.
I generally agree with you, and especially agree that the Post seems poorly managed. I guess I would choose the Times if I could only have one subscription because of all the features you describe.
However, I think all three of these papers have dealt poorly with Trump in different ways, and none of them are communicating in a way that truly serves us well at this precarious time. I mean, you've seen the New York Times Pitch Bot, right?
One GREAT thing WaPo has is the best weather column in the country (if not the world), the Capital Weather Gang. This basically proves your point, though, because the CWG started as a private blog that the Post bought years ago. And the Post has Petri Dishes.
I have a digital subscription, but all I ever look at is CWG and the food section (it's not the greatest, but I like Becky Krystal and the restaurant reviews, I used to live there and still visit friends often).
Could WaPo really buy America's Test Kitchen? I've gotten so used to it being a PBS show (one of my favorite, by the way) that it would seem weird to me to see it as part of a for-profit enterprise.
That said, I have no knowledge of ATK's business model, and almost no knowledge of "business models" in general.
It's produced by a private company. There was actually a rather bitter fight when Christopher Kimball left and started Milk Street - both are on pbs but they're commercial rivals.
Incidentally I think much of test kitchen's revenue is from their online offering that's half Wirecutter, half recipe bank, and which would be a good match for the Post trying to ape the Times. I was subscribed for a while, the offering is good but they engage in very scammy practices around making it easy to sign up but impossible to unsubscribe without calling them.
Thanks, and you know, after I wrote that comment, I (figuratively) kicked myself because I knew that they offer online things for a profit. In fact, I subscribe. (I will say I don't find it all that scammy. I've unsubscribed a couple of times when I couldn't afford it and it was pretty easy for me. That said, I didn't buy any special features, just access to recipes.)
The VS audience must skew private sector -- I would never unsubscribe from WaPo regardless of quality because it is free for anyone with a .gov email address. If anyone in government wasn't aware of this, enjoy the free subscription! The obvious downside is that you can't credibly do a performative "I'm cancelling my subscription over this!" whenever they publish something you don't like.
I used to subscribe to the digital version of the NY Times but dropped it in favor of a subscription to the Washington Post. I did this post-Trump, or at least after the Trump administration, because will we ever really be post-Trump in this country? I read these national "papers" primarily for political news, so the superiority of food sections, photography, etc of one over the other doesn't matter to me. For business news, I already subscribe to the weekly business journal in my city. I made the switch mainly for cost reasons because I also have paid subscriptions to a lot of newsletters, including this one. I guess I'm one of the #resistance because I don't mind the "democracy dies in darkness" tagline. At the same time, I think they could drop it because our democracy is currently dying right out in the light of day.
I feel similarly. I decided NYT was garbage years ago with their wishy-washy defense (and lack of renunciation of) of torture and basically, as I saw it, carrying water for republicans in an attempt to be "objective." I have appreciated the Post's coverage of politics these last few years, and while every now and then I do miss the cultural coverage of the Times, I get cultural news in other, and frankly better, spots. I also appreciate the tagline - I felt at the time they added it they were taking the threat seriously in a way few other media sites were. I still do.
In addition to not being available for purchase, anyone who is in charge of acquisitions and thinks buying The Guardian is a good idea should not only be fired immediately, but also tarred and feathered to the maximum extent allowed under the National Labor Relations Act.
I'm a lifetime Post subscriber and have been at my wits end with it for a few years, so would love to see a major shake-up, but, I agree, making changes based on how many Friday meetings there are is .... not inspiring. On the WFH thing, though, I DO think that the fact so many Post reporters have not come back to the office is likely reflected in the WAY they write about, for example, COVID or cultural trends. The tone reflects a highly neurotic, anxious personality whose views are extrapolated to represent the world at large. Inaccurately.
I'm at the point where I'm *extremely thankful* that we were back in the office full-time by June of 2020, lest I might have fallen victim to the very apparent locked-in neuroses.
I disagree. I'm 45, so right on the cusp between Gen X and Millenials, and the latter's desire to continue working from home (almost neurotically obsessed with it) has nothing to do with Covid. I know people who have quit jobs in healthcare (healthcare! A face-to-face business if ever there was one) purely because they couldn't work from home. It has much more to do with flexibility and not feeling constrained by office relationships and expectations than it has to do with Covid. Covid simply showed what was possible; then they ran with it. I can't speak for the folks at the Post, but I suspect it's the same. I would bet my paycheck those same people are still going out to restaurants, and bar, and shows, and hanging with friends. It's not Covid keeping them working from home.
I agree. I manage a retail store that was considered an essential business in the early days of covid so I never left "the office."
One thing that really bugs me about the NYT is that the tone & scope of the their foreign-affairs coverage, except when it comes to major crises like the Ukraine war.
If you read the Times, you will not get a reliable picture of what is going on in the politics of any major European country, or even Mexico or Canada. If you read the Economist, you will. The Economist is at least as slanted as the Times, but they try to inform you about the foreign country. The Times does quaint human interest stories and points to controversies abroad which resemble American culture war battles. (Or controversies which they make resemble our culture-war battles). Of course that is probably what their readers want.
The Times has the best coverage of US foreign policy, but I agree can be more miss than hit about other countries internal issues (personally think coverage of UK, China, Japan are ok).
Not as sure about the Economist. I once thought of them as having interesting and extremely comprehensive coverage of many countries. The glaring exception was the USA, where I thought their coverage of America was always just wildly off. But then I moved overseas and I also felt like their coverage of the new country was also just as bad. I trust them much less now.
I don't *trust* the Economist at all, but they tell you who is in the running to be PM of Italy or President of Chile or something like that and you can try to discount for their biases.
You can also do that for the Times on American politics (and American *foreign policy,* you are right to say they're very informative on that subject). You can't do that for the Times on Europe (or Mexico). If all you knew about Mexican politics came from NYT articles about Mexico, you would read some nice stories about wellness resorts (do they pollute?) and heroic female politicians and some grim stories about corruption and narcos, but you wouldn't know anything about Mexico. The Economist gives you a vastly exaggerated anti-AMLO line, but some idea about what the political debate in Mexico is actually about.
Exactly- if you account for the fact that the Economist is pro-liberal democracy (liberal in the economic sense), then you know their bias and can read between the lines. I’ve found their coverage very informative, even if I roll my eyes every now and again (which is far less frequent than other publications).
This article jives well with the news that Dave Weigel is jumping ship. He puts out a unique and very interesting product and the way they treated him with that suspension was absurd. The post needs to realize that it's business is good media content and not the kind that comes from staff disputes.
Where's Weigel going?
Semafore, which hasn’t even launched yet I don’t think.
I... don't know what that is. Is this a new Vox / Axios sought of thing?
I don't think there's really that much out there about it except that it's Ben Smith's new thing.
I also don't know who Ben Smith is lol
He seems like a writer with too much personality to cover politics for a national newspaper - Haberman at the Times is at least equally good as a reporter but she's right where she belongs, whereas Weigel is at his best writing a semi-edited blog like thing where he can make references atonal jazz and crack the occasional off-color joke.
The WSJ reporting is so exceptional. My dad is not a business person (retired Federal bureaucrat) but he found it to be one of the most reliable sources of news in the last five years, in particular about the early stages of Covid. The NYT shift left does nothing for him (he used to read David Brooks, but no one else there), and he doesn’t care about the side businesses. He’s thinks the WSJ opinion section is obviously noxious, but he doesn’t see it as representative of anything else they do.
Also the WSJ surprisingly has very high quality sports reporting that you can't really find in the NYT or WaPo
Yes! My dad also loves sports and will send me random article about tennis or golf that I don’t read.
The WSJ Opinion section today contains an article on Income Equality that, if they did their math properly, is one of the most important public policy articles published in a very long time. Please tell your dad that it pays to read the noxious stuff just to understand all perspectives on an issue.
lol you mean this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/income-equality-not-inequality-is-the-problem-labor-force-participation-income-taxes-transfer-payments-middle-bottom-rich-household-size-census-11661781351
which was written by the guy who co-wrote the bill that ended Glass-Steagall and who currently writes for the AEI. Sorry, but the Times and the Post employ opinion writers to research and report their articles, they don’t outsource them to think tanks whose clear and only agenda is to find reasons to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations using funny math about quintiles and pre-tax income. But hey, I don’t mind, since it saves the WSJ money to do great reporting.
I did not check the math. Did you? The claims are certainly plausible. I look forward to a debate about the ideas rather than the person who wrote about them. But that argument will not be about whether we should or should not look at income after taxes and transfer payments. It will be about how we calculate the amount transfer payments that are received and the distribution of that money within the set of recipients.
What’s funny is that the place of the WSJ as the most respected newspaper predates the Trump era by quite a bit. I knew someone who worked for a major regional paper in 2003 who told me that most of the newspaper industry thought this at the time if they were being honest with themselves. She seemed to indicate that this was a shift in which WSJ had eclipsed the NYT some time over the past decade.
This person had left leaning politics and did not at all care for the editorial page, but was pretty frank about the shared belief that it was an objectively better news reporting organization than the NYT, and worth aspiring to. I kind of wonder if the average person in newspaper journalism would be willing to admit this now.
Yep, there was a lot of angst also about the takeover by Newscorp but it seemed to not effect the reporting much at all.
Enjoyed this piece! You didn’t even mention sports, which the Times clearly sees as an additional “we’re more than our political slant” vertical with the purchase of The Athletic.
I am 100% in agreement with Josh's point that poorly run organizations are really bad at addressing poor performers. Managing employees effectively is difficult, and companies - like people - are drawn to the path of least resistance. So when a company is flying high they just ignore the need to manage people. And then when the organization runs into headwinds, they suddenly "realize" that they have employees with performance issues. It's not rocket science that dealing with poor performers all along would have prevented some of the current trouble.
And the fact that the head of WaPo thought the best way to identify performance issues was to look at meeting schedules is bizarre. If the top leadership is that clueless about assessing and managing performance, no wonder they have a bunch of poor performers still working there.
My first "real" job was in a corporate training department. One of their key metrics of success was time spent in training. The more training employees did, the more successful training was! Even at the age of 21 with no corporate work experience, I knew that was BS. But all that mattered was that it was - as you say - an objective number.
Personally I cancelled my subscription to the Post after this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/blackface-incident-at-washington-post-cartoonists-2018-halloween-party-resurfaces-amid-protests/2020/06/17/66f09bde-af2e-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html
No way I could live with myself supporting such awful behavior from powerful journalists against a nobody for a single mistake the nobody regrets and apologized for.
It almost seems like it’s the old Roman decimation strategy, off every tenth man to get the others in line because things really have gotten that out of control. Seems like they are frustrated trying to manage a newsroom full of undisciplined children and don’t know what to do other than fire some people. This might be step 1 just to get everyone still there to actually address the organizations needs.
I have always subscribed to the Times and my local paper and when the Post was actively trading Trump scoops with the Times after the 2016 election we added a digital subscription to the Post. I read more content in the Times but I am also annoyed by it more as well. I don’t read any of the Post opinion content other than the humorous ones by Alexandra Petri who is sometimes funny. I think Date Lab is a cute idea and it has the appeal of the real estate content in the Times. I consult NYT cooking all the time, play Wordle and Spelling Bee daily, and rely embarrassingly heavily on Wirecutter reviews so it’s true that I would absolutely drop the Post before the Times but I want it to succeed because the smugness of the Times continues to be off putting.
I generally agree with you, and especially agree that the Post seems poorly managed. I guess I would choose the Times if I could only have one subscription because of all the features you describe.
However, I think all three of these papers have dealt poorly with Trump in different ways, and none of them are communicating in a way that truly serves us well at this precarious time. I mean, you've seen the New York Times Pitch Bot, right?
One GREAT thing WaPo has is the best weather column in the country (if not the world), the Capital Weather Gang. This basically proves your point, though, because the CWG started as a private blog that the Post bought years ago. And the Post has Petri Dishes.
I have a digital subscription, but all I ever look at is CWG and the food section (it's not the greatest, but I like Becky Krystal and the restaurant reviews, I used to live there and still visit friends often).
Could WaPo really buy America's Test Kitchen? I've gotten so used to it being a PBS show (one of my favorite, by the way) that it would seem weird to me to see it as part of a for-profit enterprise.
That said, I have no knowledge of ATK's business model, and almost no knowledge of "business models" in general.
It's produced by a private company. There was actually a rather bitter fight when Christopher Kimball left and started Milk Street - both are on pbs but they're commercial rivals.
Incidentally I think much of test kitchen's revenue is from their online offering that's half Wirecutter, half recipe bank, and which would be a good match for the Post trying to ape the Times. I was subscribed for a while, the offering is good but they engage in very scammy practices around making it easy to sign up but impossible to unsubscribe without calling them.
Thanks, and you know, after I wrote that comment, I (figuratively) kicked myself because I knew that they offer online things for a profit. In fact, I subscribe. (I will say I don't find it all that scammy. I've unsubscribed a couple of times when I couldn't afford it and it was pretty easy for me. That said, I didn't buy any special features, just access to recipes.)
The VS audience must skew private sector -- I would never unsubscribe from WaPo regardless of quality because it is free for anyone with a .gov email address. If anyone in government wasn't aware of this, enjoy the free subscription! The obvious downside is that you can't credibly do a performative "I'm cancelling my subscription over this!" whenever they publish something you don't like.
The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” header was eye-roll inducing from the start, especially considering the ownership.
I used to subscribe to the digital version of the NY Times but dropped it in favor of a subscription to the Washington Post. I did this post-Trump, or at least after the Trump administration, because will we ever really be post-Trump in this country? I read these national "papers" primarily for political news, so the superiority of food sections, photography, etc of one over the other doesn't matter to me. For business news, I already subscribe to the weekly business journal in my city. I made the switch mainly for cost reasons because I also have paid subscriptions to a lot of newsletters, including this one. I guess I'm one of the #resistance because I don't mind the "democracy dies in darkness" tagline. At the same time, I think they could drop it because our democracy is currently dying right out in the light of day.
I feel similarly. I decided NYT was garbage years ago with their wishy-washy defense (and lack of renunciation of) of torture and basically, as I saw it, carrying water for republicans in an attempt to be "objective." I have appreciated the Post's coverage of politics these last few years, and while every now and then I do miss the cultural coverage of the Times, I get cultural news in other, and frankly better, spots. I also appreciate the tagline - I felt at the time they added it they were taking the threat seriously in a way few other media sites were. I still do.
In addition to not being available for purchase, anyone who is in charge of acquisitions and thinks buying The Guardian is a good idea should not only be fired immediately, but also tarred and feathered to the maximum extent allowed under the National Labor Relations Act.
I agree with all of this except for the characterization of the Times business coverage, which has been bad and getting worse for years.