It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on.
I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved.
It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
Bezos didn't buy DC, he bought a newspaper. The commenter was saying that the decline in quality was potentially unrelated to the acquisition and then immediately compared pre and post acquisition quality. That seems like a strange way to make that point and like it might suggest that the acquisition perhaps was related to its decline in quality.
The commenter said they moved back to DC in 2017 and noticed the change then.
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
Elementary reading skills would also make it obvious that I'm not talking about their move from and back to DC. Them moving back and forth from DC is certainly irrelevant to WaPo's quality.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
And? Why do you think that matters to what I'm commenting on? Them moving to and from DC is almost certainly completely unrelated to any changes in WaPo's quality.
That there is a personal reason for why their two datapoints are before and after acquisition doesn't change that their two datapoints are before and after acquisition such that it's hard to use those two datapoints to exclude that the ownership had major effects on the quality of the paper's reporting, if anything, it seems extremely suggestive that it did.
To be clear, my main point here is that people seem to be in total denial that The Washington Post has been in decline for a while. Of course I don't wish being fired on anyone, but I don't think that it really has much value as a journalistic periodical at this point. Perhaps it happened while Bezos was in charge, perhaps it didn't, but I don't think all the staff there and who just got laid off have been producing a great product.
The problem is your comment is missing really important information. You said you returned in 2017, but only mentioned that it was good in 2005. This leaves a 12 year period where it could have declined. You didn't say it was good in 2005 and you already started to see the decline before you left.
You have no more evidence that it declined before the acquisition than after it. It reads as some weird defense of Bezos and then you doubled down by saying management wasn't happy with employee backlash.
Anyways, I agree that the decline did start before the acquisition, like it started for all newspapers. The Internet killed the newspaper. Bezos was supposed to save it.
Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on.
I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved.
It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.