The media is imploding and after the election even the old ‘crown jewels of the media look like career dead ends. Revealingly, the Washington Post can’t even find anyone to serve as its editor.
The situation at the Washington Post is so dire that two candidates to run the paper — Cliff Levy of the New York Times and Meta’s Anne Kornblut, a former Post editor — both withdrew from consideration for the top newsroom job over the paper’s strategy, sources involved in the process say.
Why it matters: The Post is scrambling to find a new executive editor, the chair once held by Ben Bradlee, amid shrinking paid readership and revenue.
There are two things going on here.
- The media is in a wrestling match with Jeff Bezos who wants the paper to pivot away from the ‘resistance’ brand and brought in Will Lewis to do it. It already sunk other candidates for revamping the Post. And at stake is the basic question of who owns the paper, Bezos, who paid a quarter of a billion for it, or the media.
- There’s no viable direction and serving as editor is now a thankless job. The Post’s old resistance brand looks chancy now and not just because of Bezos. Look at MSNBC dropping viewers. Right now the appetite of the lefty base for this kind of programming seems minimal. That might change 6 months or a year from now, but nobody wants to be the fall guy for pursuing an unprofitable direction.
The Post, like the Times, is divided between the old school liberals and the younger wokes, and an editor will have to try and navigate that. He’ll have to figure out a viable strategy for the paper while not triggering the wokes too much. The candidates are wise enough to know what seems like a prestigious career move will end up destroying their careers.
And this is not just a problem at one paper, but for what’s left of the media.