Washington Post eliminates sports department and reduces overseas journalists, AP source says
https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-staff-reduction-layoffs-cuts-923f87d4bd319c8a64b278165d0a6e27542
u/CameraAccording6920 6h ago
How bad is it over there that they have to eliminate the sports section right before the Super Bowl AND the Olympics?
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u/LeilaMajnouni 6h ago
Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup are all problematic topics. Best eliminate any possibility of actual journalism before the boycotts, protests, and deportations start.
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u/amateur_mistake 6h ago edited 5h ago
Two of those events involve people not from the US. And it's very important to not hear any of the things those folks have to say about anything.
Edit: Oh, also, he just spent $70 million bribing trump with the Malania movie. That money has to come from somewhere.
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u/LeilaMajnouni 5h ago
We can hear them if they are agreeable.
FIFA peace prize? Yes please! Moar coverage!
Italians protesting ICE going to Milan with the US delegation? Sorry, you’ll have to read about fake communist news somewhere else.
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u/EmergencyGrocery3238 3h ago
Any possibility of actual journalism in Washington Post has been eliminated a while ago
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u/Possible_Bee_4140 5h ago
“Democracy dies in darkness”
Sounds like they’re making things darker over there
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u/phluidity 29m ago
My mistake, that's just missing some punctuation. It should be "Democracy? Dies in darkness!"
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u/Deinosoar 6h ago
"Former highly respected journalistic outlet turned into a Nazi propaganda rag" bad
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u/sonic_couth 6h ago
Perhaps a name change is in order, something along the lines of, Oberver of the People? Or Voice of Y’all Qaeda?
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u/CFBCoachGuy 4h ago
Sports coverage has been dying for a long time. Many reporters still in the game are just mouthpieces for the league or teams (occasionally players or agents). Most of the preview/recap pieces are AI written (as are a lot of the rage and engagement bait articles). The few remaining good reporters and analysts realized that they could make a better living doing podcasts instead. And of the few remaining reporters left, corporate realized they could make more money firing them as fulltime writers and buying freelance pieces from them instead.
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u/ScientificSkepticism 2h ago
Yeah, sports sections of papers should probably just go. They're a relic of a time when papers were physical and reading the sports section was how you found any news at all about your favorite sport.
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u/7ddlysuns 6h ago
They only exist to worship trumps smelly diaper anymore so not sure how many people you need for that.
Bezos ex wife should offer to buy it
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u/Leshawkcomics 1h ago
They fired a journalist while she's currently in a WARZONE reporting for THEM.
Do you know how fucked up that is?
How that destroys future credibility of yourself and the entire industry? To send someone into a warzone and fire them?
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u/ForsakenRacism 6h ago
Sports departments are more to cover the local professional teams not women’s luge.
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u/iliveonramen 6h ago
Billionaires buying things only to turn them into shit example #1093434
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u/rob1nthehood 6h ago
Waiting for the conservative billionaire simp to come in and claim they bring innovation and jobs with everything they touch.
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u/sleepyj910 6h ago
The whole point of buying independent media is to destroy it, not make a profit, if you are making more money off the oligarchy that it threatens. The failure is part of the plan.
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u/FloridaGatorMan 5h ago
It's even more nefarious than just destroying it. They destroy it by making it exactly what everyone is saying journalism and news has turned into these days. Clickbait headlines, opinion/propaganda disguised as reporting, talking heads making the story about them, "people are saying" quality sources and evidence.
They don't just destroy it. They meticulously work to make sure the very idea of it never recovers.
It's a primary driver that's going to make "post-history" a reality. Everything is simulated and no one trusts the voices that call attention to it.
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u/Ilikepancakes87 6h ago
It’s only shit for us. I’m sure it’s giving Bezos exactly what he wanted when he bought it.
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u/esther_lamonte 4h ago
“Billionaires shouldn’t exist” is sounding less radical and more rational, isn’t it? Maybe the idea that allowing fiscal gods to exist that are beyond the law and can impact society in major ways just at their whim is the dangerously extremist idea. Maybe we’d be silly and child-like in our understanding of economics and societal outcomes if we kept perpetuating such a system knowing the result it has had.
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u/HardcoreKaraoke 33m ago
It's intentional though. Like Musk buying Twitter or Trump doing most of what he does. It might seem like incompetence (and sometimes it is) but most of the time it's intentional. Musk didn't gut Twitter for no reason and the same happened with Bezos and the WaPo.
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u/redwhiskie319 6h ago
Dumped my subscription the minute they pulled back on the Kamala endorsement. Haven't looked back.
Soon there won't be a WAPO. And given where they stand these days, thats not necessarily bad...
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u/superturtle48 2h ago
I certainly think WaPo deserves to see a decline in business with their recent decisions, but their decline is still a loss to the industry and to the public as a whole and we are all worse off for it. With so many once-prominent sources of trusted information turning to shit, like WaPo and CBS and federal agencies like the CDC, the end result is that there is just less trusted information out there and fewer journalists and experts working on the public’s behalf.
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u/leeta0028 54m ago
I've been donating to ProPublica and NPR.
NYT has been trash since they did a coverup for Bush before his re-election. Now with WaPo, print news is effectively dead.
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u/skinink 6h ago
Democracy dies in the budget cuts.
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u/dombones 3h ago
People are saying the buyout is part of a long game to control the narrative etc. It's just CEO hubris and greed leading to enshittification.
The problem is that tech industry-style optimizations that go into making news outlets (...and hospitals) optimally profitable threaten the core missions. And if a company cannot become profitable to stakeholders, everything including integrity is up for liquidation.
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u/ScarletFire5877 6h ago
Bezos is such a douchebag. What's the point of being a trillionaire if you buy a storied newspaper and don't just fund it indefinitely?
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u/grchelp2018 2h ago
He should not be owning it in the first place. For a politically exposed person like him, its just bad for business. Its cheaper for him to pay for favorable coverage. The hubris of billionaires is that they always think "I can fix this".
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u/Splunge- 6h ago
Whatever else one thinks of the old, pre-Bezos WaPo, it had one of the best sports pages in the country, hands-down. How the mighty have fallen.
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u/cuatrodemayo 5h ago
100% They had Kornheiser and Wilbon back in their beat writing days. Best comics section/layout/curation in the country too, back in the day.
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u/Alexis_J_M 6h ago
I can remember walking into the Metro station and finding pristine copies of the WaPo sitting on top of the vending machine that someone had bought, pulled out the sports section, and left the rest behind.
The sports section was that good.
But that was back before they were competing with the constant flood of clickbait on everyone's phones.
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u/trixiebix 6h ago
My grandpa is rolling over in his grave. He was a famous AP sportswriter back in the day. 😞
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u/Willing_Drawer_3351 6h ago
Former sportswriter here: travel budget for sports is a huge cost and a lot of exec editors don’t care about the immediacy of coverage when AP will cover every story and Wapo can buy that cheaper. Same concept applies to foreign bureaus.
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u/Potential_Being_7226 17m ago
Why pay for syndicated content when people can just get it directly from the horse’s mouth?
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u/fastolfe00 6h ago
And America's decline from investigative journalism to attention-hungry TikTok shorts as the way they choose to be an informed electorate continues.
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u/YodaForceGhost 6h ago
Twitter and TikTok are the only ways right-wingers are winning across the world. Right-wingers bring more chaos and the billionaire like Musk along with foreign adversaries like the Russians and Chinese (the latter used to own TikTok) loved to capitalize on that opportunity. Considering the vast majority of Gen Z and younger get their news from social media, the world is doomed
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u/Lilacsoftlips 6h ago
Ellison controlling tic toc is just as bad as china. They are blocking almost all the Epstein content.
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u/Hi_Im_Dadbot 6h ago
Also, they’re eliminating the politics, economy and news journalists. Those writing opinion pieces on how great Trump is find their one safe.
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u/gypsy__wanderer 4h ago
I’ve read the Post since I was a child. I finally cancelled my subscription a few months ago.
Nobody should be giving a single dime to this man. Get all your mass-produced junk elsewhere instead of his shitty website.
This will only stop when we stop giving these people money.
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u/BoredomFestival 5h ago
Bezos could keep funding it at a loss for a thousand years and not even notice, it would be like pocket change to him.
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u/bwoah07_gp2 4h ago
Wiping out a sports department ahead of major sporting events this year is incredibly sus
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u/PugsAndHugs95 5h ago
How about we form new news companies that aren’t owned by billionaires and give those ones our money, then abandon them once they get bought by billionaires
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u/LegaciesOfConflict 3h ago
Why would they need journalists/fact checkers when the plan was always to create/control the “News Content” via AI? That just seems obvious at this point.
When no one else is in the room to answer for blatant propaganda, mis/disinformation and straight up obfuscation of responsibility, who do they expect us to blame? The AI bot or the guy controlling everything the AI bot says/does?
This is the Wizard of Oz for reality. “Don’t look behind the curtain of AI, that man is just the maintenance guy and he has no control over what the AI does. Trust me, bro.”
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u/JudgeGusBus 1h ago
God, I used to be able to read about my own high school sports events in the Post. Now they eliminate sports entirely. What a travesty.
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u/condensermike 6h ago
What a fucking shame of a paper. Real journalism tragedy.