Late last week, Mathias Döpfner, the Axel Springer C.E.O. and controlling shareholder, Politico proprietor, and perennially restive media suitor, revealed that he had lobbed his support in favor of an eleventh-hour bid for The Telegraph, the storied Tory broadsheet that has been mired in a tortured, yearslong sale process. Mathias and a small group of conservative transatlantic investors are shoring up the financing for Dovid Efune, the conservative, British-born publisher of The New York Sun.

Dovid has been circling The Telegraph since the cash-strapped Barclay brothers first put it on the auction block, but never had the necessary financing to mount a serious bid. He has finally found it in this new consortium, which also includes Jeremy Hosking, the hedge fund chief and Brexiteer, and David D. Smith, the former Sinclair C.E.O. and owner of The Baltimore Sun. The group is hoping to surmount an existing offer from Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and General Trust group, which appears to be on the one-yard line barring regulatory review.

For those just joining, the Telegraph sale is being overseen by RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale, whose own protracted battle to secure the asset failed in the face of vehement protests from regulators and the Telegraph newsroom. Before that, his RedBird IMI partner, Jeff Zucker, also failed to overcome the same antagonists and secure the paper via an investment from Emirati royal Sheikh Mansour. Frankly, one undercurrent of this whole long saga has been Fleet Street protectionist instincts bordering on xenophobia. (Disclosure: RedBird Capital, a partner in Paramount Skydance, is a minority shareholder in Puck.)

Whether the Brits would be more amenable to a Teutonic proprietor is an open question, but even then it’s not clear whether Mathias will actually be able to derail Rothermere’s existing bid. The new consortium’s proposal matches Rothermere’s £500 million commitment but offers more cash up front, less debt, and perhaps, crucially, fewer regulatory hurdles. Indeed, the group seems to be positioning itself as an insurance option for Gerry in the event that British regulators reject or delay Rothermere’s bid on plurality grounds, since he already owns one of the biggest papers in the U.K.

Last week, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy lifted the restrictions that would’ve stopped Rothermere from acquiring the option to buy The Telegraph, but his ability to exercise that option could drag on for months or even years amid regulatory review. And between Paramount’s Warner Bros. Discovery pursuit, the rest of the RedBird portfolio, and a Milan Serie A title race, Gerry has bigger fish to fry than trying to offload a U.K. newspaper. In time, the ease of the Mathias consortium’s proposal could prove compelling.

So, what’s Gerry going to do? Money can always change the dynamics here, as Gerry knows from PSKY–WBD. And I’m told that Mathias’s group has signaled a willingness to offer more if necessary. But for now, RedBird seems likely to stay the course with DMGT. Their hope is that Mathias’s last-minute incursion will inspire Rothermere to finally move ahead and acquire the option while also assuming the risk of regulatory approval. So far, Rothermere and his Goldman advisors have been dragging their feet; the prospect of losing the asset may incentivize them to pick up the pace.

Should Rothermere get the asset, Mathias will have to keep hunting. He’s been stateside in recent weeks—attending the Super Bowl, advising Netflix’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery (he’s a Netflix board member), courting potential Politico editors, and getting to know the Trump White House—an itinerary that speaks to the oft-underappreciated scope of his influence. His appetite for more media assets, however, remains unsatiated. After all, The Telegraph itself always seemed to benefit from a dead cat bounce in the sector. On the one hand, it’s a musty, old, extremely conservative and self-important British paper largely immune to change. On the other, there just isn’t that much on the market to buy.

Pity, for Mathias, that Jeff Bezos remains committed to The Washington Post despite all the recent sturm und drang at the paper in the wake of its most massive bloodletting exercise to date. Yes, the rumors percolating through the building that Bezos may be ready to offload the tortured asset are misplaced. It’s his paper, and he’s sticking with it. Why wouldn’t he?

Indeed, on Wednesday, acting C.E.O. and publisher Jeff D’Onofrio hosted a town hall to try to explain how the company’s “foundational values”—acting with integrity, producing quality journalism, committing to a healthy business—could align with its new priorities: operating in a cost-efficient manner, listening to the customer, and embracing innovation.

Among other things, Jeff sought to explain how Google’s algorithmic changes and rising costs were affecting the business. He cited a 102 percent rise in cost per piece of content since 2020, a 48 percent decline in content published across News and Opinions since 2020, and a 53 percent drop in page views since 2020. Specific section performances were even more sobering, I’m told. “We never want to be back in the position we were just in,” he said.

In the hopes of incentivizing journalists to respond to the audience, managing editor Bryan Flaherty announced that the Post will soon launch “audience value scores”—an as-yet-undefined equation of reader actions, attention, and acquisition—as its North Star metric. In his closing remarks, executive editor Matt Murray also sought to remind staff that audience growth was a shared responsibility of the newsroom.

Obviously, it’s a long, long row to hoe. At present, the Post has been brazenly furnishing its website and increasingly thin print product with wire copy and months-old articles with bylines that exited the paper long ago. It’s not clear what would inspire a new generation of journalists to join the Post and participate in this resuscitation project, particularly when the economics of the news business are headed to zero.

Not long ago, Yahoo C.E.O. Jim Lanzone appeared on my podcast, The Grill Room, to hype his progress turning around the Apollo-controlled asset, which seems destined for an I.P.O. in the next couple of years. For journalists, Yahoo News is commonly derided as the province of digital aggregation at scale—some stock quotes here, some fantasy sports there, and a bunch of wire copy–style content presented without byline. And yet beneath this superficial vision, it’s a real financial success story, and that rare bird: a digital turnaround tale.

During our conversation, Lanzone was honest about how the company was able to rebuild only after the letdown of the post-wunderkind Google comparisons and the unsuccessful Verizon acquisition in 2017. Now, the company has made smart decisions about investing in some growth areas while leaning into the unit-economics-at-scale game. Everyone reading this at The Washington Post will sure hate this comparison, but they’re closer to it than they might well think. Rather than rehire a newsroom, D’Onofrio and Murray need to focus on their core areas of coverage—the White House, national security, etcetera—and then form licensing and partnership deals while leaning into the increasingly domain-relevant developments in A.I.

The front office seems to get that. “We’re bringing Washington to the nation, and we also want to bring the nation to Washington,” Murray said at one point, while noting that nine-tenths of the Post’s readership was outside of the D.M.V. The Post can’t compete with the Times or its own history, but there’s still plenty of room to grow once the people who love it the most make room for those who actually know how to save it.