The owner of the Sun newspaper, News Group Newspapers (NGN), has given a "full and unequivocal apology" to the Duke of Sussex for "serious intrusion" into his private life and agreed to pay substantial damages.
Harry got an apology for himself, and for his mother.
“I once said that the big beasts of the tabloid jungle have no predators, I was wrong they have Prince Harry. His bravery and astonishing courage has brought accountability to a part of the media world that thought it was untouchable.” - Lord Watson.
Today’s layoffs are the latest attempt to kill what makes the paper special.
Ashley Parker at The Atlantic:
We’re witnessing a murder.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.
Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)
The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.
What’s happening to the Post is a public tragedy, but for me, it is also very personal. When my parents’ basement recently flooded, amid the waterlogged boxes of old photos and vinyl records, we found my younger sister’s baby book. There, on a page reserved for memories from the month she was born—news about visits from doting grandparents, perhaps, or descriptions of her mewling gurgles—my dad had filled the lines with news from our hometown paper, The Washington Post.
“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).” “Irangate.” “The Bork nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.” “The NFL went on strike.” “Wall Street had the worst day since 1929!!!” “The U.S. was having a garbage crisis, i.e.; running out of disposal sites, esp. in the northeast.” (To be fair, he worked in waste management. But also … welcome to the world, Baby Girl!)
Which is to say: The Washington Post feels like a part of my family’s DNA, imprinted on our earliest memories, memorialized among clippings of our hair and other, more traditional, recollections (first diaper blowout, first word).
[...]
The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.
The Post journalists I know have shown a genuine willingness—even an eagerness—to evolve, a spirit of creativity and innovation at a time of transformation in the media. But its executives seem not to know where to lead it. Among the many failures here—of leadership, management, business, imagination, courage—the actual journalism stands strong.
Journalism is—has always been—a tough industry. But I watched firsthand as Bezos, Lewis, and company spoke in turgid corporate-ese (“Fix it, build it, scale it”) and failed to launch—or even attempt to launch—initiatives that might achieve their grandiose visions. They began 2025 by unveiling the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of jumping from about 2.5 million subscribers to 200 million paying users, despite having ended the previous year hemorrhaging tens of thousands of their existing subscribers, all while blaming the journalists for the paper’s travails.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to the Post’s financial woes, or a successful business model for a local paper that is also the nation’s hometown paper. But I can tell you what will be lost if these two men—who don’t seem to understand what the Post was, what it still is, and what it could be—continue to treat it like a distressed asset or a bargaining chip with a president who, ultimately, does not respect bargaining supplicants.
[...]
Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors. As one longtime Post reporter observed to me, “We’re changing and trimming and cutting our way toward a much more mundane product, and one that doesn’t seem to attract more readers.” To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico. (In another cruel irony, Politico was born out of the Post nearly two decades ago, when two reporters decamped to launch their own fast-paced, scoop-driven, win-the-morning publication.)
But general-interest publications can be profitable. The New York Times has shown there is money to be made by diversifying, expanding, experimenting, offering something for everyone. (News! Audio! Games! Cooking! Video! Long-form!) The publication you’re reading now is profitable, and has nearly 1.5 million subscribers. Other specialty publications, such as Axios and Punchbowl News, have succeeded by tripling down on the needs and interests of their core audience. The Post, instead, is abandoning its current audience in search of one that may not exist.
What Bezos, Lewis, and their jargon-loving underlings also fail to understand is that the paper’s coverage of Washington will be neither as vivid nor as authoritative without the contributions of journalists in bureaus around the world. Those correspondents risk their life to help readers understand how, say, the United States deposing a leader in Venezuela may have consequences for citizens living in Ohio. Coverage of the White House and Congress is enhanced by a well-sourced Metro team and gimlet-eyed narrators in Style. And you can’t be this capital city’s definitive chronicler if you don’t cover our beloved Nats and Caps and Commanders, what’s going on in our kids’ schools, or what restaurant has the best pupusas.
Nearly all media outlets are struggling to reinvent themselves. But the Post should have been better equipped than most to meet the moment. It has a great reputation, great talent, and great positioning to cover local stories for a large and highly educated audience willing to pay for news, and to serve a broader national audience eager for deep political and accountability reporting.
Former Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic about the mass murder committed to the WaPo by Will Lewis and Jeff Bezos by conducting mass layoffs and section shutdowns and cutbacks, such as the shuttering of the paper’s sports section and making mass cuts to the metro and international news sections.
The New York Times, for all its flaws, recognized it had to diversify to stay alive in this era. As for WaPo, however, the disaster dominos started with the hire of Will Lewis, then the controversial spiking of the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for President, and the firings/resignations of prominent reporters such as Jennifer Rubin, Ann Telnaes, Erik Wemple, Ruth Marcus, Eugene Robinson etc.
See Also:
The Guardian: ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers
Ahh, the first ever "to be continued" post!
For TBC posts, I already have the next post scripted, so I don't need any commands, these are for posts that I wanted to be longer but didn't have the time to finish fully.
Rather than waiting a day or two for commands like I would with a normal post, I'll start working on the next update ASAP.
(It's 4:40 AM right now I'm so tired.)
I think this would be a good moment for William to say, "Hey, good on you. You did this for us. You did it for our mother." But William made his own settlement quietly, which greatly irritated Harry, and I'm not sure how much William really likes this pivot in Harry's image. I think at the moment you will find that if the man in the streets says, Good on you, Harry, for doing this... I'm not sure William adores Harry getting that kind of (good) press. - Tina Brown
Ruth Marcus dissented from paper’s new opinion policy of supporting only ‘personal liberties and free markets’
Marina Dunbar at The Guardian:
Washington Post associate editor and top political columnist Ruth Marcus is reportedly resigning following the decision by the CEO, Will Lewis, to kill her opinion column critical of the billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s latest changes to the paper.
“It is with great sadness that I submit my resignation as columnist and associate editor of the Washington Post,” Marcus wrote in a letter addressed to Lewis and Bezos and posted on X by a New York Times media reporter.
Last month, Bezos announced changes to the opinion section that appeared to more closely align the Post with the political right, saying that only columns that supported “personal liberties and free markets” would henceforth be published.
More than 75,000 digital readers of the Post canceled their subscriptions in the 48 hours following Bezos revealing his intentions. David Shipley, the opinions editor, stepped down after failing to dissuade Bezos from implementing these new mandates.
Longtime Washington Post fixture Ruth Marcus quits the paper after over 4 decades of service in various roles for WaPo due to her planned column criticizing Jeff Bezos got spiked.
See Also:
The Present Age (Parker Molloy): Another Dark Day at the Bezos Post: Ruth Marcus Resigns After Censorship
