Profile: Good News At The Washington Post

After years of layoffs, buyouts, and battered morale, the Post’s newsroom has its swagger back, according to media writer Gabriel Sherman at New York.

A lengthy article about Bezos' Washington Post notes that under Jeff Bezos, the paper has grown by 140 journalists and has won two Pulitzers. Its aggressive coverage of the 2016 presidential race frequently drives the news cycle and so infuriated Donald Trump that he has banned its reporters from his campaign. Most significantly, in business terms, since Bezos bought it, traffic to washingtonpost.com has more than doubled. When it briefly beat out the New York Times in November, to celebrate, the Post ran house ads proclaiming itself “the new publication of record.”

Getting journalism in front of readers has always been a priority for newspapers. Web publishing has only increased the stakes.

The Times has waded cautiously into the territory of “audience development,” worrying about maintaining a certain Timesian quality.

But the new Post has none of these reservations. In an era when readers increasingly get their news on social-media platforms, the Post is the only major newspaper company to publish all of its content directly to Facebook’s Instant Articles. (The Times has declined to publish most of its articles there for fear of cannibalizing its subscription business, which still makes up 60 percent of revenue.)

The Post newsroom now talks unabashedly about journalism as a consumer product. “[Jeff] constantly tells us, ‘Don’t focus on the competition, focus on the reader,’ ” says Shailesh Prakash, the Post’s chief technology officer.

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