The Meltdown at The Washington Post—and the Crisis in News

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News, News Commentary

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2026

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hello! I’m back from paternity leave just in time to talk about the biggest media earthquake of the year (so far): the Washington Post meltdown. For decades, the Post was a journalistic gem with superior coverage of politics. Last week, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos decided to gut roughly a third of the staff after the paper lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few years. Today’s guest is Jim VandeHei, the cofounder of Politico and Axios and a former Post reporter. We talk about the decades-long rise and fall of the Post before zooming out to talk about the most important changes in news media over the past 20 years, the secret of 21st-century media success, and the coming storm of AI. To read more about Derek’s opening comments on how the future of the news industry is going back to past, check out his Atlantic article on the subject here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/post-advertising-future-media/578917/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jim VandeHei Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1:06.4	Hello and welcome to plain English.
1:09.0	So several weeks ago, we recorded an episode of this show called Everything is Television,
1:14.1	where I pointed out that everything, social media, AI, podcasts, was evolving toward video.
1:21.1	And as I said on that show, I didn't expect that I would be able to resist the tide of history.
1:27.0	So here we are, in a new chapter of this show, as this is our first video podcast, I expect that I would be able to resist the tide of history.
1:27.5	So here we are in a new chapter of this show,
1:29.8	as this is our first video podcast.
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