Earlier on Monday, I wrote about how the Washington Post has lost a striking 90 percent of its readership since 2021, and as I was writing it, I began attempting to figure out how it could possibly turn itself around.
(READ: The Washington Post Has Officially Lost 90 Percent of Its Readership)
But as I sat and thought about this, a thought in the back of my mind kept coming forward of "even if it could be returned to full glory... should it?"
This isn't exactly something I thought from an ideological perspective, either. Don't get me wrong, I have a deep prejudice against the Washington Post, and not just because it insulted me, my intelligence, and this country thanks to its staff members being on the radical side of a bad idea.
The idea kept occurring to me because every time I write about these kinds of things, it's clear to me that this isn't its time anymore. You can see this mode of thought whenever I discuss corporate and legacy media in general. We're in a new age where news flows and is consumed in radically different ways than before.
To be fair, this change happened in a matter of years. This wasn't a slow transition, it happened so fast it was almost unnoticeable, and only now are we really seeing how deeply this transition has affected society. Trump's election was a clear sign, to be sure, but you can also tell just how powerful the effect of the switch was by the dying wails of the legacy news industry. Axios is a very good example of this as it bemoaned the fact that "fact-checkers" are suddenly a thing of the past thanks to the fact that the legacy media are no longer the gatekeepers of societal narratives.
(READ: The Fragility of the Censorship Complex)
The Washington Post, once one of the largest whales swimming in that sea, is now all but dead as independent journalism and free speech dominate the scene. A person with no name, byline, or degree in journalism can suddenly become a major player in news thanks to a WiFi connection and gumption enough to get the story.
Moreover, the people now fact-check each other with astounding accuracy and in such a short time that by the time the legacy media catches up, what we've talked about is old news.
The Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets, are antiques. Relics of a different age, largely supported by older generations that haven't quite grasped the change in societal norms when it comes to news-gathering and consumption. As I've written previously, it's mostly boomers keeping the legacy media alive, but once their generation is gone, the legacy media's main support column will largely disappear:
Backing up Rogan's point, Pew Research Center shows that when it comes to boomers, 22 percent trust social media, while 61 percent trust national news and 78 percent trust local news. Meanwhile, in generations 30 and under, 52 percent trust information from social media, while 56 percent trust national news organizations.
Given, there is a huge partisan divide here. Even amongst boomers, 40 percent of Republicans trust national news outlets, while Democrat boomers sit at 78 percent.
Regardless, with each successive generation, a divide widens between the people and the corporate media.
(READ: The Corporate Media's Power Is on a Literal Time Limit, and It Needs to Prepare for the End)
In order for WaPo to climb back into relevance, it would have to do some pretty heavy innovating as to how it operated, and it's going to take someone with a bit more genius than me to figure out how.
But my question is... should it?
It's an entity from an age that passed while we were asleep. To go back to it would be stepping back an age, akin to going from the Information Age to the Atomic Age. That's how all-encompassing this new way of information gathering is, and as crazy as it might sound, reverting to the way it was when WaPo was a big dog in the ring would be a societal devolution.
You're currently experiencing an information renaissance, you just won't know it until you look back on this time period years from now and realize how crazy it actually was.
So, even if we were to take ideology out of it, it's my opinion that WaPo should probably just die and relegate itself to being a museum piece. Without some serious renovations and ingenuity, that's where it's going anyway. Journalism has radically changed, and it will continue to change as we go from the information age to the AI age, which we're, even now, stepping onto the threshold of.
