In the wake of the explosive staff cuts at the Washington Post, Benjamin Mullin, Erik Wemple, and Katie Robertson delve into the role owner Jeff Bezos has played in recent years. While they revisit some fairly well-known ground in their New York Times piece—including changes to the opinion section and the end of the paper's presidential endorsements—one of their bigger reveals is Bezos' demand that the paper "embrace some of the same ideas that brought him riches at Amazon, including a focus on data and efficiency." The outcome Bezos reportedly sought was to cut the newsroom budget in half while doubling the productivity of the staff that was left.
Determining what to cut involved deep dives into customer data to calculate how each section's readership stacked up against its costs. But "the math was not easy," they write. "Foreign reporting was expensive, for example, but it was essential to keeping the Post competitive on national security, a key beat."
According to meeting recordings heard by the Times, the staff was told the story output per reporter had fallen 36% since 2020, while news and opinion pageviews had dropped by essentially half. In a nod to Bezos' data demands, staffers also learned an "audience value score" was being developed. The number, ranging from 0 to 100, took into account everything from time on page to article shares and subscription initiations. "Basically anything over 70 is extraordinarily good." Read the full story for much more here.
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