Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email and the inner-workings of the media industry. Tonight, from the nation’s capital, we go inside The Washington Post to examine its post-Trump identity crisis, and its struggles to keep pace with the Times.

One among these institutions is The Washington Post. After being acquired and resuscitated by Jeff Bezos, in 2013, the company was spurred to record growth by the overwhelming national interest in Trump, and widely celebrated for its editorial achievements under Marty Baron. Now, the paper still romantically linked to Woodward and Bernstein once again finds itself—somehow, bewilderingly—at an inflection point. The challenge this time around is hardly existential; after all, a 145-year-old institution owned by a 145-billion-dollar man, staffed with some of the nation’s best political and investigative reporters, isn’t exactly hanging by a thread. Nevertheless, the Post has challenges of direction and ambition stemming from the very parochialism that defines the town it calls home. And these challenges are amplified when its performance is juxtaposed with its biggest competitor, at least in the cultural imagination, The New York Times.

Meanwhile, in reality, the Post has spent most of its history living in the Times’ shadow. With notable exceptions, it has almost always had a smaller staff, a smaller readership, and a smaller claim on every facet of the national conversation not pertaining to politics, policy, and national security. It is, after all, Washington, not New York.

The Bezos-Baron era was one of those notable exceptions, largely because politics so overwhelmed the national conversation. The Post’s digital readership, which was already growing at a rapid clip by the time Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015, surpassed the Times’ paid audience four months later. Next month, Bezos told Charlie Rose that the Post was “working on becoming the new paper of record”—a direct shot at the Times, the actual paper of record, that became part of the Post’s marketing campaign. Bezos was also ultimately involved in deciding to make “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a quote popularized internally by Woodward, the first official slogan in the paper’s history, Post sources told me this week.

During the roaring Trump years, the Post grew digital subscriptions at roughly 50 percent year over year, reaching three million subscribers in 2020, triple the paid audience it had when Trump won the election. The Times, which had just over two million subscribers in 2016, grew at a similar clip and closed 2020 with over 6 million subs. Both papers exquisitely took advantage of the marketing, pricing, and technological levers at hand as the news media became infatuated with subscribers in a manner similar to the way Wall Street analysts monitored the growth (and growth at all costs, at least for a time) of the nascent streaming industry.

Meanwhile, the papers understandably milked the spotlight that came from their altruistic competition. They sparred daily over scoops from the Trump circus, and Times and Post reporters turned into national celebrities, with lucrative book contracts and cable news contributor deals to boot. Myriad articles about the revival of the Post-Times rivalry were written, including one particularly long feature in Politico Magazine by Joe Pompeo about the “not-so-bitter rivalry” between Baron and Times executive editor Dean Baquet, friends and fellow lovers of art.

For several years, it genuinely seemed as if this was the beginning of a new rivalry that would endure well beyond Baron and Baquet’s respective tenures. But when the Trump bump ended and Baron left, it became painfully clear that only one of these two organizations had been working aggressively to ensure success in the post-Trump landscape, and the other had not.

The Post, which has lost readers since Trump left office and now has fewer than 3 million subscribers, never built out similar lifestyle offerings, never pursued big acquisitions, and, with a few exceptions, maintained a marketing strategy largely driven by the philosophy of letting the journalism speak for itself, which hardly makes sense in a direct-to-consumer media ecosystem. The problem for the Post is that, when politics and policy and national security is not the national story du jour, there’s not a whole lot left to speak of, unless you’re a Commanders fan. And, either way, Politico and Axios do a pretty good job on that turf, too. So does, of course, the Times. The Post may be the central media light of D.C.—but what about the other hundreds of millions of people who live outside its borders?

Both the Post’s publisher Fred Ryan and its executive editor Sally Buzbee understand this problem, and concede there is a vast delta that exists between its business and that of its rival to the north, several well-placed Post reporters and editors tell me—a delta, in fact, that could take years to mend. The problem, these sources say, is that they have yet to put forward an aggressive, coherent strategy for figuring out how to bridge that gap—a strategy many believe should have been put in place well before the 2020 election.

The official line out of 1301 K Street is that they intend to grow the core product while expanding into other coverage areas, as evidenced by the recent launch of a health and wellness vertical and an expansion of climate coverage. Sources also talk about a stronger investment in technology and surveillance coverage and accountability journalism in areas like sports and entertainment. (Earlier today, the Post published an in-depth report on the NFL’s failure to promote Black coaches.) The Post has also hired Ben Williams, a veteran of GQ and New York, to oversee features. There are abstract plans to revamp the storied Style section once made famous by Sally Quinn. And the Post is also adding more overseas jobs to expand international coverage and keep the product running 24-7.

Alas, these seem like insufficient editorial bandaids aiming to address more gaping challenges. (The Post isn’t alone here among D.C. media icons. Axios reported this week that The Atlantic, which thrived during the Trump and peak-Covid era, is looking to I.P. generation, perhaps as a way to account for this new age.) All of this speaks to a desire, at least, to grow the Post’s national and global presence and to make it more intimidating outside of Washington. But it’s hardly evidence of a robust and focused strategy for making that happen. These aren’t new products, they’re ancillary beats, which means the Post is ultimately still betting on its political and investigative coverage to grow the business—and betting against the idea that it needs to refashion itself as a lifestyle brand with truly diversified offerings to sustain the journalism. Perhaps that’s possible for the Post, especially with a wealthy benefactor like Bezos behind it. But it is also evidence of that uniquely Washingtonian parochialism, which the Post, for all its recent success, can’t seem to shake.