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Every so often, incurious bosses must relearn why doing more with less always fails. Sadly, for the journalists of the Washington Post, there are few humans on earth more incurious than Jeff Bezos, the owner of their newspaper. The New York Times’ recent report on the Bezos-driven firing of more than three hundred and fifty journalists and the destruction of the Post’s institutional credibility recalls a classic genre: Overconfident Boss Who Believes a News Publication Is a Widget Factory. 

Bezos’s Amazon-ish strategy, according to the Times, involved slashing the newsroom budget by half while somehow doubling productivity and maintaining a focus on time- and resource-intensive beats like investigative journalism. The story quotes Jeff D’Onofrio, the Post’s chief financial officer and acting chief executive, explaining to reporters at staff town hall meetings that “increased costs and decreases in output” have “resulted in a doubling of costs for story-units since 2020.” Articles are also to be assessed an “audience value score” on a scale of zero to one hundred based on reader-engagement time, shares, and similar metrics. If these Amazon-inspired buzzwords and phrases failed to inspire, D’Onofrio also “noted that executives discovered in some areas it cost ’multiple thousands of dollars to publish a single story.’”

“It would be inaccurate to report that our acting CEO Jeff D’Onofrio presented a strategy at the newsroom all-hands as described in the New York Times,” a spokesperson for the Post told CJR, emphasizing that D’Onofrio’s intent was to “explain the data behind the cuts.” Yet his directives only serve to raise additional questions about how all of this is supposed to work. The very notion of the story-unit—a term, much mocked across the newsroom, that describes individual stories—implies that readers think of the paper not as a bundle of offerings but as a series of individual units: less buffet, more à la carte. 

In a collaborative environment such as the Post newsroom, quantifying non-bylined contributions to stories can be challenging. Energy reporters weigh in on stories touching on oil prices and military experts review stories about weapons tech, regardless of whether their writing or reporting appears in the piece. The value of journalism can’t be broken down into units, much less individual contributions.

Under the direction of D’Onofrio and Bryan Flaherty, the managing editor for content strategy, newsroom leaders have also sought to reverse a trend that came into practice in the days of Martin Baron, the former executive editor: allowing reporters to chase multiple angles on the big stories of the day. This let-chaos-reign approach led to high output, albeit at the expense of editorial focus. Now the Post will look to more tightly control coverage plans for marquee stories, disincentivizing reporters from running down threads deemed less essential. That may mean less chaos, but it also results in less output.

As for the reporting expenses that so vex D’Onofrio: it does indeed cost a great deal of money to send a reporter to cover a football game, a political campaign, or the war in Ukraine (or Iran, or Venezuela). The fact that it costs thousands of dollars to go and find news is the main reason why people subscribe to a newspaper, rather than gathering news themselves. The Washington Post declined to respond to questions regarding how its data might provide savings on these ordinary costs of doing reporting. 

Since the internet began eroding the economic foundations of the journalism industry twenty years ago, executives at newspapers, magazines, and online media companies alike have taken turns peering at revenue projections, scratching their chins, and declaring that what is needed around here is some good old cost-cutting. It is the approach that decimated the newsrooms of once-prestigious newspapers from the Baltimore Sun to the Los Angeles Times; that replaced much local news reporting with wire copy; and that purged BuzzFeed’s news division in favor of AI.

These executives are not morons, of course. Their layoffs and budget-slashings are always paired with the evangelistic conviction that the technological breakthrough du jour will fill the gap. Today, it is the idea that laid-off reporters can be replaced with AI. Before that, it was journalism on the blockchain, or free journalism that would somehow be monetized by the internet. 

When you read about Bezos, sitting in his 27,000-square-foot mansion in Washington, DC’s fancy Kalorama neighborhood, instructing a group of beleaguered editors to make the Washington Post more successful after laying off several hundred of the nation’s best reporters, you are not just witnessing a single instance of the disgusting high-handedness of the rich. You are witnessing the latest in a long line of business minds flummoxed by a long-standing conundrum: whether journalism is more art than science.

If the media business is a science, then the task of managers is straightforward: Calibrate the proper inputs to maximize output. Implement the implementations that mathematical progress demands. If journalism is an art, then a newsroom becomes not a factory floor to be streamlined but an intellectual salon to be nurtured. Writers become stars to be encouraged, not labor units to be Taylorized. 

The reality is that journalism is far more art than science. Building great publications requires assembling smart journalists and giving them the resources they need to flourish. It is not achieved by paying as few journalists as little as possible and making up the difference with a New Proprietary Corporate Strategy. 

It is easy to forget that the journalism industry is a victim of its own success. So profitable were twentieth-century newspapers that they began going public in 1963, ushering the executive class into the scene. Once the papers were within Wall Street’s grasp, the infiltration of scientific management techniques was a foregone conclusion.

Equally foreboding are the political stakes of this business-first approach to media. The Trump era has thrown into sharp relief the slippery slope toward fascism that is created when the government uses media consolidation as a club to crush the free press. The fate of the Post is sad not just for the loss of the many stories that will never be written, but also for the invisible but real muzzle that Bezos has placed on its opinion side, in his quest to stay in the White House’s good graces. 

Likewise, the recently approved Nexstar-Tegna merger, which will bring 265 television stations, reaching 80 percent of US households, under a single owner, was accompanied by overt editorial groveling toward the Trump administration. The losers in this process are the public, the truth, and the practice of legitimate journalism itself.

Bezos, whose greatest expertise is supply chain management, will find, like many media owners before him, that the world of journalism is stubbornly resistant to his domineering corporate tactics. You cannot make a publication better by firing a bunch of reporters. Nor can you conceal from readers the fact that you have made the publication worse. The rise of independent and nonprofit publications in recent years mitigates the doom somewhat. But it seems certain that the total number of journalists in America will settle at a figure far lower than before the tech platforms figured out how to extract all possible profit from the industry. 

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