"Although it's never really been a beacon of fine journalism"

Sorry, can't let this go unchallenged. WaPo was THE beacon of fine journalism for decades. Life existed before the 90s.

Agreed. This is the paper that Woodward and Bernstein worked for when they investigated and broke the Watergate story: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/woodstein/

And even in the 00s, pre-Bezos, it was hitting stuff out of the park:

2014 - Stop and Seize -- this series about police confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists without charging crimes was a hugely eye-opening piece of investigative journalism...was widely discussed on HN too, IIRC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/collection/st...

2013 - The WaPo shared in the Snowden-related Pulitzer, but on its own, I feel that it did some of the best work off of the material -- both in a technical and journalistic sense, including this one about NSA infiltrating Google data centers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

2010 - Top Secret America -- this to me was a highly underrated project that attempted to expose how utterly out-of-control and ungainly America's national security apparatus is. If you read it before the Snowden revelations, you probably would have just nodded your head: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

And many more...It's unfortunate that a lot of resources are now being poured into aggregate-Upworthy-baity-headline crap...but honestly, even that material is pretty good. It's just super unfortunate that their headline writer has completely engorged themselves on social media marketing. WaPo truly has some of the worst headlines of any professional publication today.

edit: as an example of some of the great work under the "PostEverything" banner, which seems like kind of the WaPo's attempt to compete with Vox/BuzzFeed/Daily Mail...I bookmarked this piece from a widow trying to explain how "the second year without my husband is in some ways harder than the first"...one of the few non-technical bookmarks on my Pinboard. In retrospect, the headline isn't bad, but the writing is still profound...I've actually been visiting WaPo via URL directly just to see what guest columns have been published...just need a plugin to hide the headlines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/04/...

Nowadays it's more of this:

http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...

>> WaPo truly has some of the worst headlines of any professional publication today.

Are you including the UK publications in this comment? Their headlines put the US ones to shame most of the time.

Well, I do think that I suffer from a bit of British-envy...years of Monty Python/Peep Show/Ricky Gervais/Malcolm Tucker have conditioned me to think that the British are the superior culture when it comes to wit.

I honestly can't think of many times when a UK headline has annoyed me in the way the Wapo does. Probably the worst offender is the Daily Mail, but they're merely artless in how they try to cram the entire article into a headline. Sample from today: "Moment of revenge: Husband is caught on surveillance footage brutally beating his wife's would-be rapist to death with a tire iron as he tried to flee NY apartment while still pulling up his pants"

But the Wapo goes beyond artless, and right into the mindset of "our readers must be fucking dumb to not be clicking on our stories in droves. Let's explain to them why they should be clicking on our stories!"

- "Trump announced his gifts to veterans. Here’s what we learned."

- "Cancer deaths rose during the recession. But why?"

- "The world is about to install 700 million air conditioners. Here’s what that means for the climate"

- "This might be the darkest theory yet about why Donald Trump keeps winning"

The one advantage of newspaper print is that, compared to webserver space, it's very finite, which means that if a story was worthy enough to have hundreds of barrels of ink tapped to make it physical, then it was a story implicitly worth the reader's time. I guess now that you can just slap anything onto a website that headlines need to be written ("X and Y happened yesterday. Here's why it's important") as if readers now automatically assume that all webstories are without value, and thus need to be constantly reminded that some stories are worth clicking through.

While your criticism stands, I think the reasoning behind the click-bait headlines isn't "our readers need to be reminded that this is worth reading", but an exploitation of human curiosity: if the headline contains an implicit question, the reader is compelled to click through to discover the answer. It's annoying, but I guess it works, since Buzzfeed continues to exist.

Today's DM also has:

- Royal Navy cadet, 27, who had oral sex with guest at college dinner dance later raped another woman in her cabin after telling he was going to 'f* her brains out'

- Woman teacher is burned alive 'by her boss' after she turned down a marriage proposal from his son in Pakistan

- The Home Office farce that will make your blood boil: Hard-working family who run Monarch of the Glen shop are ordered to leave Britain, but a convicted Iraqi child abuser and an Albanian killer can stay

- Dalai Lama says 'Germany cannot become an Arab country' as he warns that Europe has taken 'too many' migrants

It's Buzzfeed for pensioners whose hearing is so bad they only respond to wolf calls and dog whistles.

I started reading the Post regularly after moving to the DC area in 2001. Over the past ten years the paper has been garbage. It regularly promotes tabloid "news" that is of no consequence but that, I suppose, they believe gathers page views. Other stories are riddled with factual errors--just recently I read a story that got the numbers wrong in a House committee roll call vote.

The paper routinely infuriated me so I stopped reading it (except when I have to for my job, which is how I am aware of the recent factual error.)

I have seen some of the poor quality under Bezos, but to be fair I can't tell whether it has gotten better or worse because I am so disgusted with their reputation that I generally just don't read it.

While yes, the Washington Post has become more focused on new media, its really only them and the NYTimes that have successfully transitioned (as much as one could really expect) into new media.

The websites and mobile apps for these companies are awesome, especially compared to many TV channels and other old newspapers.

Additionally, in todays day and age, its clickbait that pays the bills, but that doesn't mean that it takes away from real journalism, you just have to recognize that not ever article will be as high quality. Movie Production companies have been doing this forever, I.E. Cars 2 pays for Inside Out. Even Buzzfeed has real journalism tucked in there.

Its sad, but quality journalism both makes less money and costs more to produce, and budgets for these stories have to come from somewhere.

To be fair, this has affected all publications. E.g. The Economist and New York Times.

Also, "yellow journalism" is nothing new. It's a big reason why William Randolph Hearst became a gazillionair all those years ago.

Are there editors at the Washington Post? I wrote in about some questions about an article, and no one responded. Not even a form letter.

Didn't cmdr_taco go work there some time ago? What happened to him?

He went to go work for a "labs" type startup that borrowed the Post's name, which I believe was not included in the sale to Bezos.

WaPo is dead; RIP.

Every criticism on the Washington Post can be used against 99% of Newspapers in America. The transition to web has been rough and the ability to still turn a profit for a for profit business is difficult. I think the New York Times has done the best so far and Wall Street Journal is the industry leader. I can't think of a single example of doing a better job minus NYT and WSJ.

A paper "transitioning" has nothing to do with if the spirit of the paper is alive; aka WaPo spirit is dead, company lives on.

99% of the papers in the US are trash; the fact that you'd compare WaPo to them speaks to your knowledge of the industry and WaPo itself.

> the fact that you'd compare WaPo to them speaks to your knowledge of the industry and WaPo itself.

Someone is emotional?

Washington Post is in trouble like the rest of the newspapers in American deserves this response?

How many papers have you read the staff written content from, what news did they cover, what was the quality of that content on average, etc.?

I got a big 4.0 in my Undergraduate Degree and was Valedictorian. I had to studied two dead languages and had all my last 30 credits from Graduate Level classwork. I scored in the top 90% on the GRE and MAT test.

Wow guess that is also not important about the general decline of Newspapers and their business models.

This is a easy observation on the decline of journalism and newspapers. Unless you deem everyone unable to form a observation on general newspapers?

Please be honest, do you even know what you're talking about?

If so, click reply, without using any additional resources and tell me why 99% of papers are declining - and why WaPo was different than 99% of papers.

I do know that most people don't why, or for that matter, care.

Instead of being condescending why don't you just state your opinion and not just be like "I am the smarts S-M-A-T Doh!"

I did state my opinion, WaPo is dead.

I was all excited for the climatic ending and it ended on a whimper.

Were you replying to my comment... or sharing?

Sharing that your communication style is condescending and lacking in substance. Maybe this will help you to communicate better?