This week, The Washington Post unveiled its new internal mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” If that sounds like something generated by an AI trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts and marketing textbooks … well, just wait until you hear about the PowerPoint deck behind it.
According to The New York Times, Post chief strategy officer Suzi Watford presented executives with a slide deck that would make even the most seasoned corporate consultant cringe. The centerpiece? A “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of reaching 200 million paying users.
Pause for a moment to appreciate just how disconnected from reality that number is. The Post currently has fewer than three million digital subscribers. The Times, which leads the industry, has about 11 million total. In fact, the Times reports that the Post, Times, Axios, and Politico combined don’t even reach 100 million monthly viewers—and that includes nonpaying readers.
The deck goes on to describe the Post as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.” This is the kind of corporate word salad that means absolutely nothing while sounding vaguely important. What makes a platform “AI-fueled”? How is that different from just … using computers? Don’t worry about those details—look at all these buzzwords!
The presentation laid out three pillars of the Post’s plan: “great journalism,” “happy customers,” and “make money.” Revolutionary stuff here, people. Who would have thought a newspaper should do journalism and try to make money? Thank goodness for management consultants.
But here’s where the corporate cringe gives way to something more concerning. The Post has been steadily shifting right since hiring Will Lewis as CEO last year, and now it’s “actively considering ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website.” This comes as Jeff Bezos, according to the Times, has expressed interest in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives and reaching more “blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland.”
The timing isn’t coincidental. Last year, Lewis oversaw the ouster of popular and respected executive editor Sally Buzbee. The Post’s newsroom has been in turmoil ever since, with more than 400 employees just sending Bezos a letter about leadership decisions they say have “led readers to question the integrity of this institution.” When news organizations start talking about reaching “all of America” while simultaneously planning to pump up their opinion sections and pushing out leadership that won’t play ball, it usually means one thing: a calculated rightward shift under the guise of “balance.”
The timing here is particularly rich. The Post adopted “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its slogan when Trump entered the White House in 2017. Now, as he prepares to return, they’re pivoting to … “riveting storytelling”? Nothing says speaking truth to power quite like sounding like a Netflix quarterly earnings call.
The deck did include one inadvertently honest moment, citing Eugene Meyer’s 1935 principles for the paper, including, “The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.” It’s a noble sentiment. It’s also completely at odds with everything else in this corporate rebranding exercise.
This matters because the Post isn’t just any newspaper. It’s a crucial institution for American democracy—something its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan, which will remain, actually gets right. But while democracy might die in darkness, it can also die in PowerPoint presentations that treat journalism like a product to be optimized and repackaged for maximum market penetration.
The Post lost $77 million in 2023. That’s a real problem that needs real solutions. But chasing an imaginary audience with buzzwords and AI promises while pivoting right isn’t going to fix it. It’s just going to further erode trust in one of America’s most important news institutions.
At least it’ll be riveting, though. And hey, maybe they can get ChatGPT to write some of those new opinion pieces. After all, they’re already an “AI-fueled platform.”
