The Washington Post

 Subscription Going Dark
   A few years ago, the Washington Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness", implying that newspapers were needed to shine light on the things we should know about. I have lamented the loss of so many of them, but I am now cancelling my subscription to the Post. The latest round of staff cuts announced earlier this month, was the deciding factor for me, although many of the good writers and a cartoonist had already left.
   I grew up in Maryland, across the Bay from Washington and went to university just outside the D.C. border. The very thick WaPo picked up very late on a Saturday night could help one through the worst of hangovers and last all day Sunday.
   A few years ago, I started subscribing because of a very good deal and kept subscribing when it wasn't. Apart from the fact that it was an excellent paper, I still enjoyed reading the regional coverage that included the Delmarva Peninsula. Since I submitted my cancellation, I have been asked to reconsider. I decided not to take advantage of a really good deal - $20. Apparently I have two hours left and I don't think the price is going lower. I will miss reading it. I will even miss George Will. 

BEZOSBUB
  Although some were upset when Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, he did have a lot of money and some good intentions. Lately, however, some decisions were made that were questionable and even a cartoon was cancelled. The paper is now not supposed to favour a presidential candidate and the columnists have been encouraged to endorse "personal liberties and free markets", not bad things to endorse, but it is bad to be told to do so.
  The Post is losing money, but money is not the issue for Bezos. As Ruth Marcus, who quit in March, notes: "When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise."

  To put this in nautical terms,  "among the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, [ he has a]125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)
   "Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go."
   Bezos founded Amazon, by the way. Perhaps now he is simply more interested in films than journalism since he reportedly contributed $40 million for "Melania" and spent another $35 million to promote it. 
   Whereas the New York Times purchased a company to cover sports, WaPo just fired everyone. Some were at the Olympics when they learned. Ron Charles who sent a very interesting book newsletter every Friday, was laid off and quickly became "an unemployed journalist with a mortgage". You can now find him on Substack, along with many other fine writers. The entire book section was shut down. Even if you were not a subscriber, you may have read the WaPo reviews that were syndicated.
   Most papers do not review books anymore and the Associated Press stopped doing so last year. The New York Times "Book Review" "is the last discrete newspaper books section standing." 
   There still are magazines that publish book reviews, but "The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits. A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not."
And Amazon is not the answer:
   "On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?"
  To conclude with some CANCON, I will end with the word created by Cory Doctorow and say that this is just one more example of the enshittifcation of everything:
  "We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit."

Sources:
"The Death of Book World: What the Closing of the Washington Post’s Books Section Means for Readers," By Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2026.
"How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post: The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline," Ruth Marcus, The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2026. (The nautical bit is also from The New Yorker, by David Remnick, Feb.8.)
More about "enshittification" can be learned in MM's, "On Bullshit."
Post Script: I just received another offer to re-subscribe.