The rise and fall of The Washington Post
In this video Michael Girdley chronicles the Washington Post’s journey from its 1877 origins as a Democratic Party mouthpiece through multiple ownership changes, bankruptcy, and revival under financier Eugene Meyer. He details how Meyer’s son‑in‑law Philip Graham expanded the paper, and how Katharine Graham, thrust into leadership after her husband’s suicide, made the pivotal decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, cementing the Post’s reputation for journalistic courage that later culminated in the Watergate investigation and the resignation of President Nixon. The narrative then shifts to the 1970s financial turmoil caused by powerful labor unions, the low profit margins, and Warren Buffett’s opportunistic investment that eventually yielded massive returns. Girdley explains how the rise of the internet in the 1990s eroded traditional advertising revenue, leading to steep circulation declines. He recounts Jeff Bezos’s 2013 purchase of the newspaper, the subsequent subscriber boom during the Trump era, and the failure to diversify after Trump’s 2020 loss, which precipitated a subscriber drop, editorial interference, and leadership turmoil under publisher Will Lewis. The video concludes with the 2024‑2026 crisis: massive layoffs, a $100 million loss, dwindling daily circulation, and a stark contrast to the New York Times’ financial success, illustrating how strategic missteps and external pressures led to the Post’s current decline.
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In 1971, CEO Katharine Graham picked up the phone and made the most consequential decision in The Washington Post's history. The newspaper had just gone public a few days earlier, and a $35 million stock offering was on the line. If it didn't go through, they could lose all the TV stations that they owned. And her lawyers, they were begging her not to make the call. On the other line, her editors were telling her that the government was trying to suppress the reporting that The Washington Post was about to do about why the Vietnam War was happening. In other words, that the entire war was built on lies. Katherine Graham famously said, "Let's go, let's publish it." And that decision would make The Washington Post arguably the most important newspaper in all of America. In fact, it got so influential that 3 years later, their reporting would bring down an entire president. 55 years later, as I record this video, that same newspaper that once kind of made huge worldwide impact, well, it just laid off a third of its staff. It gutted its sports page, it gutted its overseas correspondence, and now the newspaper that once brought down President Nixon over Watergate, can't even cover the Winter Olympics. This video is the rise and fall of the Washington Post. Oh, and before I tell you the story, I want you to guess. What do you think brought it down? Was it politics? Was it the internet? Was it bad management? Well, or was it something else? Hold that thought. I'll explain how it all went down. Oh, and by the way, thanks to Monarch Money for sponsoring this video.
More on them later.
The Washington Post was surprisingly started not as a journalistic integrity newspaper. It was started as a Democratic Party mouthpiece by a party operative. A man named Stinson Hutchins back in 1877. Over the next 50 years, the paper bounced through different owners, each one running it further into the ground. By 1933, it was bankrupt. Enter Eugene Meyer, a financier who had just stepped down as chair of the Federal Reserve. He was going to buy the paper out of bankruptcy and was prepared to go as high as $2 million, but he got it for just $825,000. Famously, he outbid William Randolph Hearst, who wanted to buy the newspaper not to run it, but to shut it down and eliminate a competitor. Meyer won, and he famously described the newspaper at the time as materially, physically, morally, and ethically bankrupt in every single way. Yeah, he thought that much of it. Over the next decade, Mayor famously raised circulation to 162,000. He brought in advertisers who basically tripled during that period of time and brought in revenue to support the paper. And his core principle was that the newspaper needed to be there to inform the public, not to serve the wishes of its private owners like himself. This principle was the core of kind of journalistic integrity back in the day. In fact, this was kind of peak journalism. People felt themselves as more public servants and less as businesspeople. And this principle, well, it'll come back later in the story. So remember what happened here. In 1946, Meyer handed the reins of the Post to his son-in-law, a man named Philip Graham. And Philip Graham turned out to be a pretty darn good businessperson. He expanded the Post by getting into TV, radio, and kept building the flagship newspaper. The holy grail of owning a newspaper was to be a monopoly on your local market. So in 1954, the Post bought out its main rival, the Washington Times-Herald. And this made the Post the dominant newspaper in the nation's capital. And if you could influence every politician who was reading your paper every single day, well, that was going to be a big thing. But then in 1963, something crazy happened. And that crazy thing was Phil Graham committed suicide. That left the only person there was his wife, Katharine Graham. She was a homemaker. She was 46 years old. She'd never run a business. Everybody looked to her to take over and she said, "Me?" She had no idea she was about to become the most important newspaper publisher in American history, if not in human history. In fact, her confidence was low because a number of different things. One of those was the environment that was the United States back then. It was still very much a patriarchal society. Women had their place, and that was to be at home, not inside of boardrooms or being businesspeople. And similarly, her father believed that. Mayer had famously passed over her, saying that no woman should be running a newspaper. But Graham turned out had something in her huge favor. She really cared and she was super smart. She got up to speed quickly. And in 1968, she hired a man named Ben Bradley as the editor of the Post. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers came out and these found their way to the Washington Post reporters. The New York Times had already been reporting on these. It was a 7,000-page drop that had come out and basically let everybody know that the government had been systematically lying about the reasons for the Vietnam War. And this was such a big deal that Nixon's administration, President Nixon at the time, had been trying to force them through government pressure to stop publishing them. Nixon's government had actually succeeded in getting the Times through a court order not to publish them. But then the Post got their copy and Katharine Graham suddenly had a choice to make. Was she going to live out the way her father had looked at the idea of, you know, public service, or was she going to back down like the Times had done? And that's, you know, the moment we reached at the beginning of this video.
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And it wasn't just herself personally that was going to be at risk, it was everybody in the company. If you had basically a felony charge at at that point, if they lost the case, if the government came after them and they were basically, you know, declared criminals by sharing this information, an idea that seems crazy today, they could lose their TV licenses. And remember, the IPO is going on at this point, their $35 million is happening, like it was do or die. This decision could even kill the company. And Nixon's Attorney General famously went out and said, and by the way, this just shows how different the '60s were, like it was crazy time. The guy publicly said that Katharine Graham, if she published these things was going to get her TIT caught in a big fat ringer. Like, you can't talk that way these days. This is insane what these people did. She published anyway, and the matter went to court. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in her favor. But this kind of courage was just the warm-up. In 1972, 5 men were arrested trying to break into the Democratic National Party Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. 2 young reporters working for the Post, Woodward and Bernstein, they doggedly followed the story and In fact, for a long time, they were the only two reporters in the whole country working on the item. Nixon's administration kept stonewalling them at every turn. But eventually enough leaks and enough data came out and the dogged working made it happen. And by 1974, the reporting of the Post basically brought down an entire president. Nixon resigned. But people talk about this kind of courage from Kat Graham, but it turns out there was an even more battle being fought behind the scenes, and that one involved spreadsheets and financial statements. In 1975, the Washington Post actually didn't really make great money. And what seems crazy for a newspaper, profit margins were only around 10%. And the reason was the Post had powerful labor unions that were basically gaming the whole system. They would do everything they could to make sure their members got basically paid as well as they could at the expense of the owners, even going so far as to do disreputable things like set fake type to get paid for it. That stuff that would never get printed in the printing room. In 1973, the markets had seen all this going because they looked at the financial statements and the company was only worth about $80 million. But there was a young, savvy investor who saw that this was crazy. The assets of the company alone were worth $400 to $500 million. And that investor, well, his name was Warren Buffett. The stock was cheap because people feared what the unions were doing. Warren took the other side of that. He bet that eventually Kat Graham and her team could prevail. Buffett, in starting his empire that eventually would become Berkshire Hathaway, loved buying things that were considered basically Toll bridges. And the idea being that you have to pay a toll to use the thing or to even exist. Like if you're going to get across a river or whatever. And back at that time, newspapers were essentially a monopoly on transmitting information. If you wanted to advertise and reach customers, you had to buy space in the newspaper. You had to pay for classified ads. None of the internet or any of the other options we had today existed. And so when all that happened and there was a monopoly, well, monopoly means you get to charge monopoly prices. And newspapers, especially when there was only one in the town like the Washington Post, could basically actually charge whatever they want. And when they did that, they made extravagant profits. In early 1975, these powerful unions, they went on strike. I mean, if you're going to get a little bit of money, you might as well get it all, right? But they did it in a way that was really not cool. They actually got really violent. They destroyed property, basically pushing things beyond, well, where they should be reasonable. The business had to survive in order to keep people employed. It's got to be a balance. So Kat Graham refused to give in as these particular unions went on strike. She spent the money to basically start printing things elsewhere. In fact, even having to go to the D.C. kind of government area to be able to fly the plates out because of restricted airspace. And she kept fighting it. And in fact, it became so influential in saving the newspaper that her biography had 70 pages dedicated to the strike and only 45 pages made to the impact of their work by Watergate, done with the Watergate stuff. She ultimately won. And doing things like taking presses that had been run by 17 workers now were run by 9. Unions across the country, they took notice. In 1981, there was one distant competitor for the Washington Post, the Washington Star, and those guys finally gave in and declared bankruptcy. This left the Washington Post the complete and total monopoly over information being distributed via paper in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett's investment in the company would eventually go up 3,000%, and he said that Cat Graham's courage was what made it all work. And just like many newspapers across the United States, there was nothing to disrupt them. Nobody could go after them. Heck, I remember being a customer here in San Antonio of our local local newspaper where we had one, the Express News. They would charge us whatever they would charge us. And you know what we did? We paid it. Then that's when in the late '90s everything started to change for newspapers and especially the Washington Post. The Post launched its first website in 1996. And if you remember these times, they basically just treated it like a digital version of the newspaper. These guys didn't really understand what was coming. Newspaper advertising would go from nearly $50 billion a year in 2005 to just 10 years later being 25% that. Less than $10 billion. That pricing power that newspapers like the Post had had, where they could charge basically any price and then use that to fund all of that kind of public service journalism they were doing, some of that pricing power went away. Why would I pay $100 to do a classified ad in a newspaper that didn't reach everybody when I could pay basically nothing to put it on Craigslist? The Post circulation had been almost 900,000 back in 1993. Just a couple of decades later, it would be a fraction of that. By 2012, it was 484,000 on a daily basis, down 42%. In 1989, 57,000 people worked in newspapers across the United States reporting on news. Just two decades later, around 2013, the number would be less than 40,000. Over 20,000 people had lost their jobs. Newspaper after newspaper at the time just didn't have the ability, the culture, or the technology knowledge to be able to adapt for what was coming. I mean, heck, how are you supposed to run a business when you have all these big unions charging big bucks? Big fixed costs with all these printers, the cost of putting out paper every day when somebody like Craig from Craigslist could basically eat your entire classified business by just building a quick website. And these newspapers, they tried, but one by one they all kind of failed for various reasons. But amongst them was they just didn't know how to deal with the fact they were getting disrupted. And as the 2010s came around, Katharine Graham had passed away and she was long gone. Her son Dan Graham was now in charge. And look, he still owned the Washington Post. It was at the time one of the most influential newspapers newspapers in the world and started to call around to tech leaders and business leaders and asking them, hey, like, what should we do with this newspaper? And he called basically everybody. And then he called a guy named Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. All these famous people said basically, I would get out of the newspaper business. It's not a good, not a good business to be in. It's getting disrupted by the internet. Why do you want to be there? Except for Jeff Bezos. He said, well, actually, you know what, I'd like to own the Washington Post. And in 2013, he agreed to buy it for a cool $250 million. The Grahams family, 80 years of owning the Washington Post, was over. So interestingly enough, he didn't buy the entire Washington Post Company. He just bought 14% of the revenue, only the newspaper part. The rest of it had been worth $40.2 billion. That shows you how much the once crown jewel, the newspaper, was worth in the age of the internet. Bezos, who had been famously amazing at building Amazon and coming up with all the innovations there and operating at a really high level, Michael suddenly was going to try to work the same magic, but with a newspaper. Bezos was there for the very first meeting with his new staff in September 2023, and he laid out his vision for the Post. The Post would be a daily ritual for people, a bundle of stories that they would read together from a source that they trust. He threw money to make the Post world-class. The newsroom grew from 600 people to over 900. They moved to fancy new offices. They invested a ton in technology. To make the whole thing, well, the best it could be. Within 3 years, they doubled their web traffic and they reportedly went from losing money to profitable, which is crazy for a newspaper at the time. Then something magical would happen for the Post. That magical thing was Donald J. Trump. He got elected. Trump and his early adviser, Steve Bannon, coined a thing called flooding the zone, which basically meant each day you put out as many kind of newsworthy and challenging things as you can, and then you see what sticks and the rest of them you get away with. Because people just can't consume more than one thing per day. And the Post, with its motto of "Democracy dies in darkness," saw, well, basically a never-ending flood of stories it could cover and outrage from people, well, of every walk of life and side of the political bent. By the end of 2020, the Post would have 3 million subscribers, many of them online paying. It was massively profitable, and they kept winning Pulitzer Prizes. It seemed like everything was working, and they kept spending to match that. I I mean, when things look like they're going good in a business, a lot of times you can't imagine them failing. And that was what was going on at the Post. And despite Jeff's vision for having a diversified bundle, which you'll find in newspapers today, like the pretty successful New York Times, of which I'm a subscriber because they have good recipes and also I like Wordle, but don't judge me. But because of what happened with Trump, basically the Post went all in on this political identity side of stuff, playing Trump's game with him. How many things can he flood the zone with? The Washington Post and their subscribers got addicted to basically Trump being able to do that. But unlike a cooking app or some of the things that you see that are a bundle that keeps people happy, the New York Times, the Post was becoming like a one-trick pony. Like you're basically stuck. And it turns out Donald J. Trump wasn't going to be president forever. And while the Times basically had its own Trump surge, the Post didn't take that moment to diversify like they did. You know, come back to Biden. In 2021, Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. And when Biden came in, he didn't play that same game. Things got a little calmer and, well, sleepier, depending on which side of the political aisle you're on. But the customers who had come to the Post looking for all the political intrigue and the flood the zone stuff, suddenly the zone wasn't flooded anymore and they started to leave. And The New York Times at this moment had been smart. They diversified all that stuff I talked about before. And when the Trump era ended, they didn't start hemorrhaging subscribers like the Post did. And in 2025, they reportedly made a $550 million profit. The Post publisher, a guy named Fred Ryan, had basically failed to make any plan for a post-Trump era. 2023, they lost $77 million. Subscribers went from 3 million down to 2.5 million. Remember, this is a high fixed cost business. If you, if you have one extra subscriber or not, you still have to pay for your bills, your headquarters, all that kind of stuff. So when you lose revenue, it can really hurt. When things start to go badly like that, they start to change staff. And Bezos would make a fateful decision with his next hire. In 2024, Bezos hired a guy named Will Lewis as publisher and CEO, and the guy had a heck of a resume. He had been publisher of The Wall Street Journal and he'd been an advisor to Boris Johnson, well, PM of, well, the UK. Lewis came in ready to mix stuff up, but it turned out he had his own baggage. He got into it with his newsroom and folks like that. And remember, This is a union culture. These folks have a high sense of entitlement about what's right for them. And suddenly folks were resigning based on battles with Lewis over how the organization would be organized. Then the real bomb happened in October 2024. For the first time in recent history for the Post, the editorial newsroom announced they would not be endorsing a candidate in the race between Kamala Harris and President Donald J. Trump. Trump. And here's the crazy thing: the Post editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Harris. Bezos and the publisher Lewis, they killed it. This turned into huge news. It turns out there's something that reporters love to report on: other reporters. So this is a well-reported thing. But within a few days of the announcement of this endorsement getting blocked, the Post lost 250,000 subscribers, nearly 10% of those remaining. To put that in perspective, Louis had proudly announced 4,000 new subscribers as a big win in the previous year, and they suddenly overnight, because of one move, lost 250,000. The newsroom was super pissed. They didn't feel like they were independent anymore. And remember Woodward and Bernstein, the guys that had brought down Nixon through their reporting over Watergate? They released a statement calling the whole thing disappointing. Yuck. Here's the thing. Uh, the conventional wisdom of why all this happened is suddenly the Post is different and Bezos, who owns it, is radically scared of what Trump might do to him if he basically didn't toe the line. Trump has billions of dollars of contracts with the U.S. government, and Bezos personally owns a rocket company that has a lot of government contracts. If Kamala won, well, Bezos would be fine. But if she didn't, well, he might be in big trouble in the pocketbook. In February 2025, Bezos decided the Post should go where the wind was blowing and basically used coded language subscribed at the Post would now be a newspaper that would back freedom and liberty, which is a lot of the language used by the Republicans who just happen to be in power right now. If you didn't have those viewpoints, well, those would be left to other folks. This made things even worse. The opinion editor, he resigned on the spot and they lost another 75,000 subscribers. The newspaper that had now famously published the Pentagon Papers and had brought down a president was now famously spiking stories in order to protect the owner's pocketbook. Remember Eugene Mayer's principle that the paper should be a public service and not one that protects the pocketbooks of his owners? Yeah, not so much anymore. So here's the thing. When revenue goes down in a business like the Post, you got to cut expenses too. And as I record this in February 2026, the Post just announced a huge layoff. Over 30% of the reporting staff of 800 is gone. Over 300 people, including folks from Metro, sports, and overseas coverage of foreign events. The Post reportedly lost $100 million in 2024, and daily circulation is down below 100,000. To put that in perspective, a mid-city regional newspaper will typically do more than that in the United States now, even after how horrible things have been for papers. Even conservative or semi-conservative publications like Barron's are coming after the Washington Post, saying the retreat from the journalistic integrity that they had done in the past and the kowtowing to those in power currently was, quote unquote, sickening. Here's the crazy thing. The same day that all that was announced, The New York Times announced its best year ever, 12.8 million subscribers and $550 million in annual profit. And because of some fateful mistakes, one is going the right direction, The New York Times, in terms financially, and the other one is getting hollowed out. And that's The Washington Post. Oh, and if you're new here, I turn every single one of these videos into a one-page cheat sheet so you can be the guy or gal at the next cocktail party explaining to people about the rise and fall of newspapers. So if you want to download it, go to girdley.com/youtube. Bezos is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, so losing a little bit on the Post is potentially, you know, not a big deal to him. $100 million, you know, what's that between friends? But the problem is the Post represents existential threats to where his real wealth has come from, and that is Amazon. And he's got no choice at this point other than not pick that battle. And look, if the Post dies, there's a decent chance it will be the best ROI investment he's ever made. Suddenly a threat to the existing leadership structure in the White House and in Congress is gone if the Post disappears or is gutted. And look, if you connect the dots, Amazon just also paid $40 million for the rights to do a documentary about the First Lady, Melania Trump. And the reporter for the Post who used to cover Amazon, well, she just got laid off too. If you think about this story, I think it's a case in point of what great leadership can do or can't do. You got Kad Graham, who made the right decisions at the right moment that proved to be fateful and saved the newspaper and turned into what it was. Then on the other end, you have Lewis, the new publisher and CEO, who seemingly made the wrong call at every step. And the biggest one was not diversifying the newspaper from just being a delivery of news. And the New York Times is a great example of how the Washington Post could be totally different today, just with a few different decisions. All right, let me know what you think about this one. I tried to also tell the story of why newspapers have died, uh, in the context of the Washington Post. Hopefully I did it. Let me know what you think in the comments below. I'll try to read them all. See you next time.
