On Wednesday afternoon in Washington, around three hundred journalists were told they no longer had jobs. That evening, in San Francisco, the paper’s chief executive was photographed at the NFL Honors.
He resigned on Saturday, in a note to staff reported to run to fewer than a hundred words. The chief financial officer is running the company for now.
The detail about San Francisco will do most of the work in most accounts of this, and it is a real detail rather than an unkind invention. It is also not the explanation, and treating it as one lets the actual decision go unexamined. Roughly three hundred of eight hundred newsroom staff, cutting hardest into sports, local and world coverage, is not a lapse of attention. It is a considered answer to a question about what the product is, and the answer is wrong in a way that is worth setting out, because a lot of other newsrooms are being offered the same one.
The reaction inside the building was not measured and did not need to be. Marty Baron, who edited the paper through its most decorated years, called it one of the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s great news organizations. The newsroom union said the outgoing chief executive’s legacy would be the attempted destruction of an American institution. Neither the chief executive nor the owner was at the meeting where staff were told.
Two papers, one question
The question both institutions have faced for fifteen years is not how to get people to read. Reading is abundant and free. It is how to get people to pay every month, forever, for something they can mostly get elsewhere.
The Post’s answer, through the last decade, was essentially to be indispensable on the biggest story in the country. National politics, investigations, the Washington machine covered better than anyone. When that story was enormous, so was the audience, and subscriptions followed it up.
The New York Times spent the same decade answering differently, and the difference is visible in what it bought. Games. Cooking. Wirecutter. The Athletic. Audio. None of those is journalism of record, and two of them are not journalism at all.
By the third quarter of 2025 the Times had a little over twelve million paid digital subscribers, and more than six million of them, just over half, were on the bundle or on more than one product rather than on news alone. It has since been moving the bundle price up from twenty five dollars a month toward thirty, which is a thing you can only do to people who would notice its absence.
What the difference actually is
It is not breadth, and it is not that one has more money. It is the shape of the demand.
Demand for news is event driven. It spikes with elections, wars and scandals, and it recedes between them, and the recession is not a failure of the newsroom. It is the nature of the thing being sold. A reader who subscribed during a crisis is not lapsing out of disloyalty when the crisis ends. There is simply less to be indispensable about.
Demand for a habit is flat. Somebody does the crossword every morning. Somebody looks up a recipe on a Tuesday because it is Tuesday and there is chicken in the fridge. Those behaviors do not spike and they do not recede, and crucially they generate a reason to open the app on the eleven months of the year when nothing much is happening.
A subscription is priced monthly, so it is renewed monthly, so it is judged monthly. On a random Tuesday in a quiet month, the reader is not asking whether your investigations desk is excellent. They are asking whether they opened the thing this week. A product that is superb during events and quiet between them loses that question over and over, and no amount of quality in the event coverage answers it, because the question is not about quality.
Which makes the cut the wrong way round
Now look at which desks went.
Sports, local and world. Those are not the prestige desks and they are not where the prizes come from. They are, precisely, the habit desks. Sport runs every day and produces a reason to check the app in July. Local runs every day and is the one thing a reader genuinely cannot get anywhere else, because nobody else is at the zoning meeting. World is the section people read when American politics is exhausting, which describes a great deal of the calendar.
Cutting those to protect national political coverage concentrates the paper further into the spiky product. It makes the good months better and the quiet months emptier, and it does so at the exact moment the subscription business needs the quiet months to hold.
There is a version of this decision that makes sense on a spreadsheet, and it is worth stating fairly. Those desks are expensive per reader. A local bureau serves a fraction of a national audience. Sports competes against outlets that do nothing else. If you are optimizing for cost per page view this quarter, they are the obvious candidates and any consultant will circle them.
The error is one of accounting rather than of judgment. Those desks are not read by everyone, so their direct revenue looks thin. What they produce is retention across the whole base, and retention does not appear on any desk’s line. It appears as an absence: the cancellations that did not happen. No newsroom has ever been able to invoice for that, which is why it gets cut first, and why the effect shows up two years later as churn nobody can attribute.
If you are the one doing the work
For anybody running a smaller publication, the transferable part is not the specific desks. It is the test.
Ask what a subscriber does on a quiet Tuesday. If the honest answer is nothing until something happens, then the business is a bet on the news cycle, and the news cycle is not a thing anyone can plan a payroll around. The fix is not necessarily a games department. It is one recurring thing a reader comes back to on a day when nothing is on fire, and it usually already exists somewhere in the building, undervalued, because it is not what anybody there wanted to be known for.
And for the three hundred: sports, local and world reporters are the ones with the most transferable craft in any newsroom, because all three require turning up somewhere regularly, understanding a system nobody else has bothered to learn, and filing on a schedule. That is worth saying in a week when the market will price them as overhead.
