Jay Hoffmann

Books, movies, and code


The Real Story of the Crisis at The Washington Post

Burying the lede here, so to speak.

In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.