#media-competition

#media-competition

When Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post in January 2024, he was received as a potential redeemer. The Post had lost $77 million the previous year under Lewis's predecessor as publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, an affable man about town who was once Ronald Reagan's post-presidential chief of staff. "The state of the paper when Fred left was really bad," says a senior staffer on the business side. "It was basically like two generational news cycles of Trump and COVID made the execs feel like they had a strategy and then the music stopped and subscribers fell away." From its high of 3 million subscribers at the end of the first Trump administration, the Post was now down to 2.5 million, and half of its online audience had withered away from a peak in 2020. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, was looking for a leader to jolt the paper to life.

The Filter, like the rest of The Guardian, will be paywall-free and will rely on affiliate revenue. This has worked well for The Filter's U.K. offering - The Guardian told Digiday that The Filter received 62 million views and 8 million clicks through to retailers in its first year, leading to a "significant volume in sales," though they didn't provide details on those numbers.