Corp News Outlet Reportedly Lost Nearly 90% of Digital Readers in 4Yrs

Centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of the left-leaning Washington Post which the report by Owen Klinsky via the Daily Signal in Part I below reveals suffered a stunning loss of digital readers.

But local news is more trusted, according to research by Pew and others, as will be noted in Part II of this article.

Part I

News
Corporate Media Outlet Has Reportedly Shed Nearly 90% of Digital Readership in Only 4 Years

Owen Klinsky | January 13, 2025

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Washington Post’s web traffic has taken a nosedive since 2021, with its digital readership declining by nearly 90%.

The outlet, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, had around 22.5 million daily active users in January 2021, according to Semafor. As of the middle of 2024, however, that number had fallen to just 2.5 million-to-3 million.

The corporate media outlet has also seen an immense drop off in revenue, which decreased from $190 million in 2023 to $174 million in 2024. On Tuesday, the Post began laying off approximately 4% of its workforce in a bid to improve its financial health, with the outlet’s publisher revealing in May that it had lost $77 million in the last year.

The newspaper lost over 200,000 subscribers in October alone, after deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate. Bezos reportedly quashed the Kamala Harris endorsement.

A slew of Post staffers who supported Vice President Kamala Harris resigned following the decision, including Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and journalists David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts.

Sally Buzbee, the Post’s top editor, stepped down in June after three years in the role. The Post did not provide a reason for Buzbee’s departure or include a statement from her, but her exit reportedly followed her objecting to Lewis’ plans for a reorganization.

A wave of high-profile reporters also left the Post following the November presidential election, including Josh Dawsey and Tyler Pager. Veteran opinion columnist Jen Rubin also reportedly left the outlet to start a new media publication with President Joe Biden’s ethics czar Norm Eisen, CNN reported Monday.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of over $230 billion, according to Forbes, and purchased the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013.

The Amazon founder was one of a slew of tech moguls to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump following his November victory, joining Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Bezos also reportedly donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund in December.

The Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Owen Klinsky is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Part II - Additional Related Information plus Other Topics

The Knight Foundation reported that "Six in 10 Americans say they have more trust in local than national news to give them information they can use in their daily life..." in an article entitled "Local News Most Trusted in Keeping Americans Informed." Local news would include platforms such as articles in this Patch.

Pew Research had a similar and more recent finding.

In an article by Pew dated 5.7.2024 under the headling "Views of local news" it said: "many Americans express positive feelings about their local news media."

"For instance, most U.S. adults (85%) believe local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community, including 44% who say they are extremely or very important.

Those who feel more attached to their local communities are especially likely to hold this view: Around two-thirds of Americans who feel very attached to their communities (66%) see local news outlets as extremely or very important, compared with around a third (31%) of those who feel not very or not at all attached.

Older adults also are more likely to perceive local journalism as important to their community. Around half of U.S. adults ages 50 and older (51%) say local news outlets are extremely or very important, compared with 38% of adults under 50 – including 34% of those ages 18 to 29."

The left-leaning Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in an article on 1.9.2025 ran an article by Howard Polskin entitled: "Will Progressive and Mainstream Audiences Keep Switching off the News?"

Polskin explained that his left-leaning newsletter that provided headlines from right-leaning news outlets has plunged since the Trump election victory, but so have cancellations and disengagement with other left-leaning media.

Quoting Polskin via CJR.

"Seventy-seven-year-old Rhode Island resident Ramsey David struck an equally morose tone. “Nothing lasts forever including democracies and me,” he wrote. “Don’t take it too personal. We cancelled the NYT, The New Yorker, Atlantic, podcasts and emails, etc. We are turning off the national politics switch.”

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a more conservative think-tank. In an article by Christine Rosen entitled "The Suicide of the Mainstream Media" on 11.15.2024, she said the following.

"When Biden announced he would run for reelection in 2024, media figures fell into line. They parroted White House claims, including many made by Vice President Kamala Harris, that Biden was hale, hearty, and ready to take on Trump again. It’s not clear how many were willingly gaslighting themselves or were deliberately misleading the public about the president’s condition. But it is fair to say many clearly believed that, with Trump running again, the stakes were too high and that even an aged and cognitively diminished Democrat was more appealing than a repeat performance in the Oval Office by The Donald.

Then in late June, the first presidential debate occurred, and Biden’s decline could no longer be hidden or explained away. A genuinely adversarial press would have questioned its own behavior in failing to report on this fact and would have fully and fairly investigated the murky process whereby Biden was then forced off the ticket and replaced by Kamala Harris—who had never received a single vote from a Democratic primary voter.

Instead, the media chose to launch the most unidirectional effort to destroy a single political candidate the modern era has ever seen, while propping up the lackluster performance of Harris by slavishly celebrating her campaign’s messaging of Joy!, Brat summer!, and the many other slogans that never seemed to land with voters. There was no campaign by top media figures to demand that Harris engage in tough interviews. Instead, the press repeated her campaign’s claims uncritically. The media-enabled “vibes” election quickly devolved into one permeated by smug assurance, perhaps best captured by the campaign sign seen in the upper-income blue areas of the country where members of the media elite live and work: “Harris/Walz—Obviously.” As for voters who might not find Harris’s candidacy obvious, the media hammered home the message that a vote for Trump was a vote for fascism, and, by definition, any “low-information voters” (also called “garbage” by President Biden) who dis-agreed were complicit in its rise.

It didn’t work. Harris lost, and lost decisively. In fact, the extreme hyperbole and over-the-top displays of partisan bias by the media during this election cycle might have helped Trump get elected. This might be the first national election in which media bias proved fatal not for its intended target, but rather for the media themselves and their preferred political party, the Democrats. Unable to identify their own liabilities, they suffocated inside their own partisan bubble.

In this election, alternative media (both independent and conservative) and social-media platforms (particularly X) consistently and effectively surfaced the stories mainstream outlets refused to cover or covered only with extreme bias. They reminded voters (who get a significant portion of their news from social media) of the Biden/Harris administration’s dismal record and candidate Harris’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about what she planned to do as president. On certain key issues, such as gender transitions of children, the persistence of these stories eventually required even the mainstream media to respond with accounts of their own, many of which ended up confirming the reporting of these smaller outlets.

Republicans proved in 2024 they can win against a media that was not merely biased but fully weaponized against one candidate and one party. ..."

While it may be too soon to declare legacy media is 'dead,' some on the left are obviously worried that a death spiral has begun.

Jumping ahead to the conclusion of her article, Rosen wrote about a remark made to the left-leaning New York mag: "as an anonymous TV executive told New York magazine, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.” Alas, this reflection is unlikely to prompt meaningful reform by the mainstream media itself. But as an epitaph on the political journalism of the recent past, it is an indisputable truth."

This writer for MHProNews and this Patch series has said and maintains that the sheer dollar value of much of the often left-leaning legacy media means it will fight and continue for the foresable future. That is why readers must be aware of the bias of their sources.

While there is a case to be made that the battle for information dominance is far from over, ALG's Bill Wilson provides evidence that trust in media, particularly left-leaning media, is down sharply. https://patch.com/florida/lakeland/mainstream-media-heyday-over-will-alternative-media-outlets-rule

There are many reasons to read local news media, like the Patch. The opportunity to truly know those sharing news items has its own value. I'm in media and have been involved for years via our own and other publications. Knowing how media often (not always) works, I'm a critic of weaponized reporting.

Speaking for myself, I'm grateful to the Patch for this ongoing opportunity to engage locally on topics of even national or global importance.

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L. A. “Tony” Kovach is a publisher who has earned multiple awards in history. He and his family live in a manufactured home on private property in Winter Haven, FL. He is the co-founder of Manufactured Home Living News.com (MHLivingNews.com) and Manufactured Home Pro News.com (MHProNews.com), trade publications serving segments of the manufactured home industry. Having worked in several segments of the manufactured home industry for over 3 decades, Kovach is a widely acknowledged and often praised expert on manufactured housing. ###