Boo freakin’ hoo.

To the eternal sadness of all people to the right of Karl Marx, the Washington Post has announced that it will be reducing its headcount by 240 staffers.

The reductions, thankfully for the people involved, will be accomplished through buyouts rather than layoffs. Even I, a critic of the Post and hardly a friend to their staff, am relieved that nobody will be kicked out of the plane without a parachute.

This way I can have my schadenfreude without being an a-hole about it. Nobody is going to lose their home.

Washington Post will offer buyouts to cut staff by 240 https://t.co/xplm3Ta70f

— April D. Bethea (@AprilBethea) October 10, 2023

Traditional media outlets as a group are getting hammered, and have been for a long time. The rise of the Internet was a blow; the dominance of social media as the new town square has been another. And, ironically, it was the invention of Craigslist years ago that started the bleeding, wounding newspapers in particular with a near-fatal blow.

Who could ever have guessed that the bulletin board-style site would bring the demise of the newspaper industry? Craigslist only brings in a billion dollars, but it destroyed the revenue stream that kept the print media rolling in dough for over a century.

The Post informed its staff this morning in an email and published a story on the matter this afternoon.

The Washington Post announced plans Tuesday to offer voluntary buyouts to its staff, in an effort to reduce head count by 240.

In an email to staff, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer wrote that The Post’s subscription, traffic, and advertising projections over the past two years had been “overly optimistic” and that the company is looking for ways “to return our business to a healthier place in the coming year.”

The Post currently employs about 2,500 people across the entire company. A newsroom meeting is planned for 10 a.m. to discuss the buyouts, which will be offered to employees in specific jobs and departments.

“The urgent need to invest in our top growth priorities brought us to the difficult conclusion that we need to adjust our cost structure now,” Stonesifer wrote.

Stonesifer added that the buyouts are being offered in hopes of “averting more difficult actions such as layoffs ——a situation we are united in trying to avoid.”

A 10% reduction in staff is not insignificant, but it comes in the wake of a series of layoffs and staff reductions in recent years, both at the Washington Post and across the industry.

25 years ago the Post had over 700 in its print shop alone. Soon it will have fewer than than 2400 employees total, in all its departments. The bleeding shows no signs of stopping soon.

While the finances of the news industry have been crumbling, trust in the news media has been dropping like a rock as well. Few people have much or any trust in newspapers, TV or the Associated Press which feeds them the data and many of the stories.

Nor should they.

As truly satisfying as it is to watch the MSM suffer the consequences of their poor choices, it does have a huge downside: nobody has the infrastructure to gather the news independently. Like it or not, we rely on the MSM to deliver facts to us, even if they are distorted. As the news industry collapses that infrastructure does as well.

We will get more canned and massaged “news” stories, not fewer. There is soon to be even less diversity of sources to rely on, and the propaganda pushers will accumulate even more power.

The lesson? Be careful what you wish for. As awful as most media outlets are, what replaces them might be even worse.