Jeff Bezos has given up on the Washington Post

PLUS: The decline of longform video on YouTube

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Washington Post Tears Up Plans to Cover Winter Olympics

From the NYT:

Kimi Yoshino, a managing editor of The Washington Post, sent a terse and unexpected email to more than a dozen of the newspaper’s journalists on Friday, notifying them that their coverage plans were abruptly being changed.

“As we assess our priorities for 2026, we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics,” Ms. Yoshino wrote. “We realize this decision and its timing will be disappointing to many of you, so please reach out to me if you want to talk further.”

Ms. Yoshino’s email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, took journalists at The Post by surprise, since it came just two weeks before the Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Italy in early February.

At this point, it’s hard to believe that Jeff Bezos has any real ambition to grow the Washington Post into a larger business. For much of the past year, I was willing to suspend disbelief and assume there was some broader strategy at play. But now it feels more like a company managing decline. In fact, its leadership is behaving much like private equity owners of newspapers—cutting costs primarily to squeeze out short-term profits.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

“We’re not trying to recreate social media”: How Minnesota’s Star Tribune navigates a local crisis

From Semafor:

“Our goal is to add reporting to figure out what really happened in any particular episode, to go beyond the video that’s firing around Instagram,” [Minnesota Star Tribune editor and senior vice president Kathleen Hennessey] said.

“We’re not trying to recreate social media, we’re trying to deliver what you’re not getting, which is names, dates, locations, the comment and account from ICE and from DHS, angles that you’re not seeing what happened before, what happened after. Obviously the power of video in the story is real, but it is also limited, and we’re very aware of that every day,” she said.

It’s been interesting to see how traditional media and citizen media have coexisted and collaborated during the federal government’s violent occupation of Minneapolis. Every protester has been trained to have their phones out and recording during their clashes with federal agents, hence why every violent encounter is shot from multiple angles and then quickly uploaded to social media.

Meanwhile, traditional media outlets take this footage, review it, and then conduct additional interviews to further contextualize it. As a result of this effective collaboration, the Trump Administration has struggled to control the narrative, with its statements being debunked within mere minutes after being issued.

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YouTube Distribution Is Tilting Toward Shorts, Pressuring Long-Form Reach, Data Suggests

YouTube has shifted the way that it recommends content on its homepage in the last year, with much more emphasis on Shorts videos. As a result, the top creators that focus primarily on longform video have seen a sizable decline in their per-video average viewership. On the one hand, this makes it easier for small creators to break through, but on the other hand it means the entire creator ecosystem is more reliant on YouTube’s algorithmic recommendations than ever before. [Net Influencer]

ICYMI: The economics of ghostwriting books

Gotham Ghostwriters founder Dan Gerstein explains the ghostwriting process.

The NFL is More Popular Than Ever. It Still Needs to Lean on Creators For Growth

The NFL understands the writing is on the wall for the TV networks that delivered reliable revenue growth over the past few decades; that's why it's leaned so heavily into creator partnerships in recent years and is busy building out its own streaming capabilities. In fact, it's conceivable that 10 years from now the league will be operating entirely as a direct-to-consumer subscription offering that bypasses all the media middlemen entirely. [Next in Media]

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