Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politicking in the age of Trump. If you’re a subscriber, you are dominant and talented, like the Seattle Seahawks. If you’re not a subscriber yet, it’s time to get your act together, like the New England Patriots. (I’m from Boston and I’m allowed to say this.)
The biggest tech story dominating Washington right now is, incidentally, a media story. Last week, shortly after The Washington Post laid off 400 staffers and closed many of its desks, and before its absentee CEO Will Lewis got summarily shoved out, I wrote a column trying to figure out whether there was even a cynical, self-interested reason that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos continued to own the Post: Was it to support journalism, make money, or suck up to Donald Trump?
This weekend I learned of a discussion that would have both saved the Post money and supported several journalists, but never went through: After it was reported in late January that the Post was eyeing the elimination of the sports desk, the Washington City Paper, a renowned newspaper with deep roots in DC, had offered to purchase both the Post’s sports and local sections, thereby keeping those journalists employed.
Sources close to the discussion said Mark Ein, the owner of the City Paper and a part owner of the Washington Commanders, had approached then-CEO Lewis weeks ago with a proposal: They could instead spin sports and local into a separate entity that the City Paper would then invest in and host on its platform. (News organizations selling off sections and IPs is not an unheard-of phenomenon.)
Though Lewis was reportedly receptive, the discussions abruptly ended last Wednesday, when the Post closed those sections altogether and laid off the journalists who staffed them. In the case of the sports’ journalists, they were right in the middle of the Winter Olympics and about to cover the Super Bowl.
That decision hit particularly hard for longtime Washington Post readers: A generation of sports journalists had grown up on the Post’s coverage of local teams, and it was two local beat reporters that ended up breaking the Watergate scandal.
In response to an X post imploring him to hire the newly available Posties “to give this region the coverage it deserves,” Ein said that he was “on it.” The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.
Even more confusing…
Over the weekend, I hit up some more insiders from the worlds of journalism, tech, and the Trump gossip chains, all of whom had worked with Bezos and the Post, looking for answers. It turns out that they were just as confused as I was, and two of them allowed me to print their thoughts.
An executive who’s worked in journalism and philanthropy and worked with Bezos:
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