Washington Post Grasps for New Direction as Trump-Era Boom Fades

Pretty telling how willing the Post was willing to cooperate with WSJ on this story. It’s almost as if they’re looking for investors who see an opportunity…

 

I agree with that. But that is to some extent damning with faint praise. As a child of the suburbs I always look at how much coverage a paper covers the large suburban counties of the metro area. The Post expends very little effort in covering suburban school bond issues. etc in the Washngton Metro area. The Post has poured most of the additional resources Bezos has provided into their national staff.

From what I have seen of the Boston Globe they still perceive themselves as a local/regional paper. The Globe will spend a lot more time and money on stories about state troopers abusing overtime than the Post will.

 

Isn’t that the point of the NYT, to be the country’s paper of record, not necessarily the city’s?

But it still has plenty of NYC-centric stories every time I log on.

 

Has been a long time since I've read the Globe daily, but this was certainly the case 10-15 years ago.

The Times is as much a New York paper as I am a Los Angeles resident. But as has been noted, to some extent, that's it's Brand (trademark pending).

 

If you want to know what’s happening in the Bx or Bklyn, pick up one of the tabs.

 

After Watergate the Graham's made a decision to make the Post a great local paper rather than a national paper. The New York Times also made a conscious decision to be a national paper rather than a local one.

I think I remember reading an article where Warren Buffett, who was long a major Washington Post shareholder and was very close to Kay Graham, explained it in terms of supermarket ads. The Post had very high market penetration in the D.C. area and received a lot of advertising money from retailers like grocers and also from classified. Given the affluence of the Washington area the Post had a gold mine locally if they retained their local subscription base. Since Bezos took over the Post has moved to a larger emphasis on national news but they do retain some of their local coverage.

While the Times did get ads from upscale department stores it did not sell pages and pages of ads to car dealers, grocery stores or from classifieds. That was because it never had the local circulation that a paper like the Daily News. Instead it had a a niche audience of affluent readers, even locally, who were indifferent to whatever happened in Brooklyn or the Bronx. The Times correctly determined that they were best suited to chase advertisers interested in reaching this demographic. As an example the Times beefing up their travel section was a successful attempt to attract advertisers interested in hitting this segment.

 

I don't know about you but I got my job through the New York Times.

 

This used to be particularly true a couple decades ago, back when newspapers had, you know, pages, and stuff. The Daily News used to have a thick, thick Queens section...and I imagine Bronx and Brooklyn sections closer to and in those boroughs. The News, of course, is considerably leaner these days. Even by today's standards, the Post still does a pretty good job of making the local news mix seamlessly with the national stuff.

 

NYT lolololololol

 

Taking this into account, and some of the other information in the WSJ article, and I'm not sure that the Post should be especially concerned. Traffic is down 25 to 30 percent, October 2020 vs. October 2021. If only there was some important, nation-wide event that could explain that drop. Likewise, I'm positive that Trump helped moved subs, but I don't think there was any indication of what the Post's cancellation rate has been, year-to-year.

 

One Times reporter said early in the century that the revenue from the four special fashion supplements paid for all the paper's foreign news coverage every year.