Rarely does such a sharp and jarring industrial juxtaposition present itself in a single winter morning, but such was the case on Wednesday. Earlier today, The New York Times Company announced its solid, if unspectacular, fourth-quarter earnings results: 450,000 more digital subscribers, which has the company ready to cross the 13 million threshold early this year; revenue of $802 million; adjusted EBITDA of around $192 million. Yes, the NYT stock dropped on the NYSE, but it rebounded later in trading hours as investors recognized that C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien remains on track to reach her stated goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.

Around the same time, by comparison, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray informed staff, via Zoom, that the paper would begin a devastatingly broad and long-anticipated round of job cuts, including more than 300 of the newsroom’s 800 journalists and more still on the business side. The Post would shutter entire sections—sports, books, the photography department—while drastically reducing both its local and international coverage, Matt said. Meanwhile, the Beltway institution would reorient itself around core coverage areas like politics, national affairs, national security, business, science, health, and wellness—a sorta proto-Politico, which is having its own headaches, by the way. (Story for another time…) “We can’t be everything to everyone,” Matt wrote in a memo, stating the obvious. “But we must be indispensable where we compete.”

The reaction from Post staff and alumni was a collective convulsion of uninhibited grief and anger—a legit trauma bond on a scale unseen in any of the previous rounds of layoffs that the paper has been forced to endure. Former executive editor Marty Baron called the Post’s demise “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.” Former Post reporter Ashley Parker called it a “murder,” and “the latest attempt to kill what makes the Post special.” Throughout the day, X effectively served as a forum for affected journalists to announce their terminations and commiserate.

Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner, views these cuts altogether differently: as a necessary step to reverse years of hundred-million-dollar revenue losses and reestablish a sustainable business model. After all, he never suggested that the Post was a philanthropy or 501(c)(3)—a surprisingly obvious point that has often been lost on many of his charges. But since buying the paper, Bezos has long emphasized the importance of sustained profitability, perhaps as a cudgel to get the historically bound business to address the realities of the modern news market. On Wednesday evening, a source close to Bezos told me, “The entire industry is going through generational disruption. Bezos is trying to save the Post. It needs to be rebuilt for the world we live in today.”

For their part, the majority of current and now former Post staff I spoke to on Wednesday don’t necessarily reject that thesis, though they are highly dubious about Bezos’s altruism and plan. When he bought the Post in 2013, he had said, “You can’t shrink your way to relevance”; in this decade, they point out, the Post has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs and buyouts nominally enacted in the service of rebuilding the paper for relevance. On the newsroom floor, there’s a broad consensus that Bezos, a centibillionaire and historic entrepreneur, has simply stopped caring about the fate of the trophy asset he bought for a mere $250 million, and today was the ultimate manifestation. (The Post did not comment for this story.)

One of the great challenges of the Post saga, as any journalist knows, is that the truth is rarely simple. And this story in particular is nuanced and complex, featuring bouts of selective narration on all sides—including from some of the storytellers who are now sadly exiting the building for the final time.

A persistent fiction in American media, as broadly evidenced today, is that The New York Times Company and the Post still operate on the same plane. Yes, they are intertwined in the public lore and history, and the Grahams and Sulzbergers weathered many wars together during the Nixon era and beyond. But the Times made nearly a billion bucks this quarter and earned a couple hundred million in operating profit. The Post is private, of course, but industry guesswork suggests that the business generates perhaps a couple hundred million in top-line revenue per year, weighted down by those staggering losses. The Grahams operated the company like a regional powerhouse, and had been willing to let it slide into the maw of local-news economics before Bezos entered the picture. Any assertions otherwise are fanciful memories and counterfactuals.

The illusion of a veritable rivalry with the Times was fortified, for a time, by the surge in subscribers that the Post enjoyed in the Trump I era, when scoop machines like Josh Dawsey and Parker, herself, were churning out palace intrigue from inside the White House. Millions of new customers signed on to support the paper’s declaration that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But like many corporations under the withering gaze of the second Trump administration, the Post pivoted—repositioning into a more supine editorial posture to ostensibly cater to a smaller, Economist-inflected audience while alienating just about everyone else. Cancellations skyrocketed, and the new readership hasn’t arrived.

Recent chapters in media history have also taught us that the Post’s Trump I gains were probably always going to be temporary or illusory. Sure, former C.E.O. Fred Ryan failed to diversify the business, but it’s unclear whether such measures would have even been successful. The Times, with its superior brand, was already pacing ahead in the battle for educated liberal mindshare among paying audiences—a market that turned out, as has been the case with streaming, to be smaller and less forgiving than once imagined. Meanwhile, a new generation of companies was dicing up the professional web into affinity-centric brands that catered to hyper-specific audiences. By the time Post C.E.O. Will Lewis got Punchbowl-curious, the deal would have cost Bezos more than his original acquisition.

Lewis famously promised not to sugarcoat the bad news with his newsroom when he arrived at the Post, but he wasn’t entirely honest either. With a few exceptions, legacy media brands from Yahoo to MTV to Forbes are irreversibly getting smaller and more focused—and not all of them are going to make it. (Local historians will recall that The Washington Post Company sold once-venerable Newsweek to the Harman family in 2010 for a buck.)

It may have been heartbreaking when Murray announced today that the sports and books departments would be shuttered, but how could that have been a surprise? Those content areas, which are challenging to monetize, have long been colonized by other insurgents. This wasn’t a murder—it was the sad result of an escalating cold war between management and talent that had led to a total breakdown in communication over irreversible changes in the industry, all exacerbated by distrust over other squabbles: the Kamala Harris endorsement saga, Sally Buzbee-gate, this new Opinions guy, etcetera. Understandably, as Bellow once wrote, everyone is blind with rage.

Whatever Bezos’s designs on the paper, there seems to be a near-universal rejection of Lewis—perhaps the most hated man in Washington since Dan Snyder (or James Buchanan)—who was conspicuously absent from Wednesday’s call and sent no memo. Before Matt ended his call, several current and former Post reporters had reached out to note his absence, asking, “Where’s Will?” One posited that his refusal to announce the layoffs himself was “a dereliction of leadership,” to which another responded, “So what else is new?”

Will still maintains Bezos’s support, I’m told. Then again, it’s hard to imagine who else would want the job.