Mark Coatney

@KTmBoyle if anything, though, Bezos is responsible for not figuring out what to do when those experiments didn't work, which did, indeed, kill the Post (also hi @KTmBoyle !)

@KTmBoyle This makes sense but doesn't tell the whole story. Because Bezos bought a still-living entity, and funded a lot of experiments (hello ARC) that would, in theory, make it a more viable business. Those things didn't work out, and that's on him, but he didn't just write a dumb check

I left the Washington Post 12 years ago. An editor told me Jeff Bezos would gut the paper and I wouldn’t have a job very long. The motto when I left, before they changed it to ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ was “For and about Washington.” They changed it to communicate the diminished ambitions of a once grand paper. Anything that didn’t directly impact the Bethesda or Fairfax reader had already been cut. The newsroom had dwindled to 600 or 700 reporters after many buyouts. The Graham family strategy was to become a local paper, free from the cost of international bureaus and expensive teams. Marty Baron was brought on to execute this local strategy (we called it managed decline) before the surprise Bezos purchase changed everything. Bezos did the opposite of what the newsroom assumed he would do: he poured obscene amounts of money into a cash incinerator. He gave the Post a fancy new building. He subsidized every section of the paper, even the ones with no readers. He expanded international. He financed experiments in video and podcasting. He gave the newsroom a blank check for over a decade. Rather than pursuing a strategy based in reality, the Post newsroom became very accustomed to a billionaire patron giving them everything they wanted in perpetuity. In retrospect, this was a terrible business decision because it made the young reporters and editors delusional. The old ones who remembered the cuts and the pain of the business before Bezos— when they finally took the free coffee away—they had all been fired or left the industry. The “For and About Washington” strategy was also a loser, because it retained the most expensive parts of the newsroom while diminishing its reach. Sports is expensive. Metro news is expensive. And as pretty much every other local newspaper in the country has learned, the old local paper model is broken and has been since the internet arrived. The Post’s brand was and is Washington politics. It’s the seat of American power. It should be focused on covering politics from its premier perch in DC. It should have never been distracted by anything else— it only ever needed this product. It lost sports to the Athletic. It lost International to The Times. There’s no reason to compete on those products. The Post can still own politics, and every story, feature and reporter should be focused on covering it. But it needs to stop pretending that the world didn’t change 20 years ago and start listening to its readers again. There are solid media companies being built for the future and the Post can become one of them. But the old Post died many decades ago. Pretending Bezos killed it isn’t true.

@elonmusk is an NPC. Change my mind.

@herandrews My Cherokee ancestors who were displaced from that nice Research Triangle area you called home would like a word, lady

The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?” One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own. He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today. The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back. He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself. Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today. I want to ask him: Did that happen peacefully? Or is there a violent dispossession in the recent past from which you benefited?  Is there a 91-year-old Baltimore native who longs for the beautiful row house he grew up in, who can’t return to his old neighborhood because he’s afraid for his physical safety? What would it take for that guy to get his house back?  The analogy isn’t exact. Coates’s analogies aren’t exact, either. The point is to get you to think about the systems of dispossession that you benefit from beyond your individual actions. That’s Coates’s whole theme, getting people to reflect on their complicity in violence.  It would really help his argument if once, just once, he applied that to himself.

@jk_rowling Wait are you the croc in this analogy?

It’s quite extraordinary how many people think a crocodile will be so grateful you’ve fed it red meat for years that it’ll let you stroll away unharmed when you decide you want a break.

@clairlemon Clearly, you have never heard Mobb Deep....

All mobs are the same whether they are left or right, religious or secular, male or female. This last week has been an important reminder—in case anyone had forgotten.

@elianayjohnson Hmm. Sans serif hedline? Picture?

Spot the difference.

@thomaschattwill It's also not true, but you know that @thomaschattwill

It is unconscionable

@clairlemon Why is this irrelevant? It’s from a piece describing Kirk’s life and works, which this is definitely part of

Completely irrelevant and gratuitous

Paging @conservmillen how do you reconcile Christianity and support for this? themcphersonsquaregroup.com/opinion/2025/7…

So I thought the @Nataliekitro interview with Honan was pretty good, but was disappointed there was no push back at all on things like this. Honan is just allowed to say 'we're enforcing the laws' without being questioned about the laws ICE is breaking nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/…

@samhaselby I mean Trump hasn’t raised the minimum wage either so what’s your point?

I am here to try to help the liberal bourgeoisie understand how the Democrats lost the working class. They, however, do not wish to understand.

In 8 years, Obama never raised the federal minimum wage

What Does It Mean When Most of the Web's Content Is Mass Produced? augmentations.beehiiv.com/p/what-does-it…

Kinda feel like the Naked Cowboy was the worst performance in NYC since 1992 but OK

@evefairbanks So, uh, do you think they’ll be proven wrong?

ABC calls the District of Columbia for Harris with 0% of precincts reporting 😂

@MikeIsaac @Chronotope Also, honestly, what does this guy think is going to happen? He’ll just send over a few engineers and they can figure out/run all of NYT?

incredible tweet from ceo of perplexity, the AI search engine that has ticked off a number of publications, for a few reasons 1. reporters already not happy w/ them 2. NYT (and others) recently served them with a C&D 3. they are supposedly on a charm offensive with the press

@amandafortini Hopp?

Tonight in Livingston, Montana

FYI, this is how SpaceX, a private company, marks their emails in an attempt to have it exempt from the FOIA when they communicate with a govt agency.

Update: listened. Can confirm

This will be good