Fact-based news is necessary, but can it be profitable? I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles, News Corp, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, Barron's Market Watch, and Fox News, will announce quarterly profits today. News Corp's price-to-earnings ratio. That's a measure of investor optimism in the company. It's very high compared to other media properties, driven by a sense that the firm Rupert Murdoch developed, is doing well, converting its legacy media to the digital world.

Meanwhile, another tycoon Jeff Bezos today faces a backlash for the sweeping layoffs announced this week at the Washington Post, which Bezos owns.

There, the digital transformation is not so good.

Marketplace's senior Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams has more.

The Washington Post layoffs represent a disturbing trend, not just in the media business,

but in the country overall, says Arcon Fung, who teaches public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School.

A successful democracy depends on an information environment in which people can understand what's

going on with their government, and that information and news isn't going to produce itself.

And old school news organizations have struggled to find a sustainable business model.

A huge amount of advertising revenue, which used to go to organizations like the Washington Post,

and hundreds of local newspapers has shifted over to social media organizations.

Some of the struggles of the news business are self-inflicted,

says Nick Usher, who teaches communication studies at the University of San Diego.

There's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. We're not making money, so we're going to cut labor.

But when you get rid of your journalists, it's kind of hard to do journalism.

So newspapers and news publishers are putting themselves

in this death spiral where you weaken the product and when you weaken the product, people leave.

The people in this case, being subscribers and audiences who have ever more options for where to get

their information, whether it's real journalism or not.

In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. We're talking about the Washington Post, another property in the Jeff Bezos portfolio.

Amazon reports quarterly profits today. Those results could include the cost of closing down.

It's Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go physical stores, which were ways to grab something quick without a trip to the full Whole Foods casino.

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