When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he said he wanted to give the storied but struggling newspaper the “runway” it needed to take off in the digital age.

A few years later, the plane seemed to be soaring. Readership was up, revenue – built on new digital subscriptions – was up, and the newsroom’s scrappy staff was trading scoops daily with the New York Times, and doing essential journalism, particularly during the campaign and administration of Donald Trump.

Bezos, wisely, had left the renowned editor Marty Baron in place until he retired in 2022. The billionaire owner, who paid only $250m for the paper, even gave the Post its now-famous motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Post had regained the swagger it had under its legendary publisher Katharine Graham when it broke the Watergate scandal that helped bring down a corrupt president in the 1970s.

But these days, the Post is struggling once again. It lost an estimated $100m last year, readership has dropped dramatically, and a roughly 1,000-person newsroom staff has been shrunk through........

© The Guardian