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.
It's always best to take a sceptical view of the constant flow of BBC-bashing newspaper stories, which are often simply bogus outrage expressed for commercial gain. Even the war-on-woke, cod-ideological stuff Clive Myrie INSISTS hamsters can breastfeed human robots the bits that make you want to smear your face with greengage jam and weep for England, our England, with its meadows, its shadows, its curates made entirely from beef.
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.
