A 2024 op-ed from the Washington Post scolded legal sports betting
About a third of the newspaper’s staff was let go this week in Washington
The Washington Post continues to make headlines after the daily newspaper based in the nation’s capital laid off a third of its staff on Wednesday.
The Washington Post headquarters in One Franklin Square in Washington, DC. The Washington Post opined in 2024 that the liberalization of sports betting was a bad bet for the country. (Image: Shutterstock)
Among the biggest WaPo job casualties was the sports department, which is being entirely shuttered. Notable former Post sports journalists include John Feinstein, Michael Wilborn and Tony Kornheiser, who would go on to create and host ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” and Christine Brennan, the first woman to cover the Washington Commanders, then the Redskins, in 1985.
DC has struggled to be a true “sports town” compared to other East Coast cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The capital’s transient, politically-obsessed, government-focused population has been critiqued for being too occupied with those matters to care and support their local teams.
“For decades, however, the Post treated sports as a vital part of life in the District. Whatever the rest of the country thought about Washington’s teams and fans, there was no better place to read about sports than the nation’s capital,” wroteAssociated Press reporter Noah Trister.
Scott Van Pelt, whose sportscasting career began in DC at FOX5, and today hosts “SportsCenter at Night” from Washington, also chimed in on the Post job cuts.
“Growing up reading the Post, I didn’t realize it wasn’t like this in other cities. I didn’t know how lucky we were to enjoy giants of their craft like Kornheiser, Wilbon, Boswell, Kindred & Feinstein,” SVP wrote on X.
Washington Post Sports Betting Coverage
The Washington Post’s sports section is being remembered fondly by the people who worked in the department. But when it came to the legalization of sports betting across the country, an opportunity made possible by a May 2018 decision in the US Supreme Court, the Post was no fan.
In a December 2024 opinion, the Washington Post Editorial Board concluded that legalizing sports betting was a “terrible bet.” The op-ed, one of many where the WaPo editors wrote against the landmark SCOTUS decision, held that legal sports betting has delivered societal harms to vulnerable people.
When easy access to addictive substances or experiences, such as gambling, increases, so does addiction. Unsurprisingly, then, problem gambling and addiction are rising, along with associated financial distress, bankruptcies, foreclosures, job losses, and suicides,” the Dec. 2024 editorial read.
The WaPo editors blamed the sportsbooks for the problems caused.
“Legalized sports betting was supposed to enable gambling companies to identify and weed out problem bettors. Instead, the opposite has happened: High rollers who lose are targeted and courted as VIPs, showered with quick credit and other perks, and encouraged to gamble more — to ‘chase’ their losses, in industry parlance. Those who actually win big get limits imposed on how much they can bet,” the op-ed continued.
Sports Betting Landscape
Today, sports betting is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. In the nation’s capital, bettors can place legal sports bets online and in person.
Anyone aged 18 and older can make a sports bet in DC.
The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have seen significant subscription cancellations in the days since their billionaire owners decided not to endorse in the presidential race after the editorial boards at both newspapers proposed backing Vice President Kamala Harris.
National Public Radio reported that the Post saw more than 200,000 cancellations. Sources said The Times, which has less than 400,000 subscribers, had more than 7,000 subscribers cancel for “editorial reasons.” Total cancellations over the last few days were higher, but internal data did not give reasons in those cases.
Those losses amounted to about 8% of the roughly 2.5 million print and online readership of the Post and at least 1.8% of the audience for The Times. Any subscription drops are painful for financially shaky organizations whose futures rely heavily on building robust audiences online.
The Post suffered its particularly large setback, insiders said, because it built much of its reputation on being an unflinching Trump critic, adopting the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Many readers said they subscribed because the paper that exposed the Watergate scandal 50 years ago also held Trump accountable for his lies, his inflammatory and sometimes racist rhetoric and his attacks on institutions.
“This is a self-inflicted wound on the part of the Washington Post,” Martin Baron, former editor of the Post, said in an interview Monday. “Many of these readers signed up for the Post because they believed it would stand up to Donald Trump. And now they fear this is a sign of weakness … and an invitation to Trump to continue to bully the owner of the Washington Post.”
The angry reaction prompted an extraordinary response from the newspaper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The Post published a column by the billionaire, one of the world’s wealthiest men, in which he defended his decision not to endorse Harris, saying that the tradition of presidential endorsements had not helped the public but, instead, served to “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
He depicted the decision not to endorse in the Harris-Trump race as an attempt to begin to restore trust.
“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” Bezos wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wrote that the tradition of presidential endorsements had not helped the public but, instead, served to “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
(Brent N. Clarke / Invision / Associated Press)
Bezos rejected claims that he declined an endorsement to Harris in hopes of mollifying Trump, although he acknowledged that his web of business interests would always present appearances of potential conflicts of interest.
The Times’ owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said last week that he had decided not to endorse in an effort to ease sharp divisions surrounding the election. He said he trusted readers to pick the best candidate.
Readers accused the two venerable outlets of refusing to take a stand in the face of what they see as the dangers of another Donald Trump presidency.
“Our democracy is very much under threat, and we should be bolstering our institutions as an act of defiance against the threat of authoritarianism,“ said Miguel Santana, CEO of the California Community Foundation and a prominent civic leader in Southern California. “Choosing to sit this one out is shortchanging our community at the time when we need the institution most.”
David Warren, a long-time university administrator who is now retired, said The Times’ lack of endorsement made it appear Soon-Shiong had no respect for the years of critical reporting on Trump by his own newspaper.
Warren rejected the suggestion — raised by Soon-Shiong— that The Times should have provided readers only with a side-by-side matrix on Harris and Trump, comparing their records and issue stands.
“This excuse is like saying we should give the fantasy of creationism the same validity as the scientifically proven truth of evolution. We should not,” said Warren. “It’s so disingenuous and it seems cowardly. And I don’t think the paper should be cowardly.”
Many long-time readers said they were dropping The Times reluctantly but felt they had no other choice.
“I am absolutely heartbroken that I had to cancel because I truly appreciate all the brilliant hard work you all do everyday while the profession withers around you,” said Stephanie Stanley of Tarzana, who once worked as a journalist in New Orleans. “Unfortunately, I don’t see how else readers can express their shock and disgust.”
Some journalists at The Times joined readers in renewing their warnings about a potential unintended consequence of a reader cancellations — undermining The Times’ ability to fund its journalism, at the very time when the public says it wants public figures held to account.
Matt Hamilton, who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering scandals at USC — along with reporters Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle — also pleaded for “heartbroken” readers to consider the impact of dropping The Times.
“We have the largest newsroom west of the Mississippi,” said Hamilton. “These subscriptions underwrite our journalism, and they make it so that we can have more people covering City Hall, local courts, the school district, more people in Sacramento and D.C. Canceling your subscription just hurts the journalism effort.”
The Times had received as many as 1,000 emails and letters protesting the non-endorsement by midday Monday. About 90% of them criticized the paper and its owner.
At least some readers called not publishing the Harris endorsement the right move.
Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong said that he had decided not to endorse in an effort to ease sharp divisions surrounding the election.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
“A balanced approach is best,” wrote Keith Hagaman, a real estate investor who lives in Marina del Rey and Hawaii. “Kudos to Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, albeit it may be too late. If he had done this a few years ago, so many subscribers would not have left.”
Lloyd del Llamas had years of experience with journalists as a city administrator in several California cities. He credited Soon-Shiong with spending millions to bolster The Times and agreed that even disappointed readers needed to stand fast or risk having to rely on the less probing coverage provided by thinly staffed suburban newspapers around Southern California.
Terry Tang, the executive editor, directs the newsroom that produces The Times’ news pages. She also oversees the Opinion department, which includes the editorial board. The board, managed at the time by editorials editor Mariel Garza, tried to persuade Soon-Shiong to go ahead with an endorsement of Harris. A series detailing the dangers of a second Trump term had also been planned but not published.
“We understand that many readers are disappointed and angry that The Times did not make a presidential endorsement,” Tang said in a statement Monday. “ We want our readers to know that we deeply value the trust that they place in us and work hard every day to earn that trust. But canceling subscriptions will hurt our ability to provide the robust journalism our communities rely on.”
Garza resigned over the blocking of a pro-Harris editorial. She wrote in the Boston Globe on Monday that she suspects the owners of both papers did not want their business interests impacted by “a vengeful Trump administration.” Both have denied their businesses played a role in the decision.
The Atlantic published a critique by Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer, who resigned along with Garza and opinion writer Karin Klein.
“In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office,” Greene wrote, “demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.”
The leaders of the union representing Times journalists also issued a new statement, saying Soon-Shiong should go beyond his social media posts and previous remarks by “writing an explanation to readers and the staff further detailing how he came to this decision and what it might mean for future endorsements.”
Soon-Shiong told The Times on Friday he had no regrets about the decision not to endorse. He did not respond to a request for further comment on Monday.
Staffers at the Washington Post also pleaded with readers not to cancel.
Post columnist Dana Milbank excoriated the owner for the decision, which he said “gave the appearance of cowering before a wannabe dictator to protect Bezos’s business interests.” But he joined colleagues in pleading with readers not to abandon the newspaper because of the owner’s action.
“Boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” he wrote. “We lost $77 million last year, which required a[nother] round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be. … For all its flaws, The Post is still one of the strongest voices for preserving our democratic freedoms.”
Jennifer Mercieca, a political historian and communications professor at Texas A&M and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” said every action in the final days before voting closes on Nov. 5 is provoking new levels of anxiety among an already tense electorate.
And for those who fear Trump, any sign he may have sway over powerful institutions only redoubles concern, Mercieca said.
“It wouldn’t have been a story had you all just endorsed,” she said. “Nobody would have been concerned. But the fact that you chose not to is telling — and people read into that with fear.”
Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
Springfield Shopper is the local paper that The Simpson family subscribes to. Writers of the show have had a field day coming up with clever headlines and visual gags.
With the show entering its thirty-sixth season this year, we weren’t able to get all of the headline gags in one post. If we missed your favourite one, be sure to share it in the comments below. CLICK HERE for part one.
COLLEGE POINT, Queens (WABC) — Pro-Palestinian protesters swarmed the New York Times printing facility in Queens, one of the largest facilities in the nation.
Some popular newspapers will likely be delivered on a delay Thursday morning due to the commotion at the facility.
Police say that at around 1 a.m. Thursday, protestors prevented tucks from accessing the 300,000-square-foot building by blocking the roads with debris.
Many laid down in a chain, connecting to each other with tubes. They held signs that read, “Stop the presses. Free Palestine” and “Consent for genocide is manufactured here.”
This facility is responsible for printing the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the New York Post. There are 27 printing facilities across the country.
Law enforcement was called to clear the protesters. No arrests were made.
The trucks eventually gained access to the building.
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Ben Smith speaks on stage during the Semafor Media Summit on April 10, 2023 in New York City. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Semafor
Semafor, the tech news startup founded by former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith and former Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith (not related), is now working with Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI on creating news content with the help of artificial intelligence (A.I.). Semafor is the latest news organization to explore A.I. partnerships with tech companies, as the media industry cautiously navigates the technology.
Under the partnership, Semafor is launching a news product called Signals, “in which journalists, using tools from Microsoft and OpenAI, offer readers diverse, sophisticated analysis and insights on the biggest stories in the world as they develop,” according to a LinkedIn post by Rachel Oppenheim, Semafor’s chief revenue officer, today (Feb. 5).
Signals will serve readers as a breaking news feed, where A.I. assists Semafor journalists in gathering information across news sources. Human editors will oversee the and fact-check all the information, Semafor said in a statement, and turn it into a presentable format for readers that links back to the original news source. Semafor is led by CEO Justin Smith while Ben Smith serves as the publication’s editor in chief.
The statement also said the way news organizations have been presenting news for a decade through “stubs” doesn’t meet the challenges readers currently face, referring to the amount of misinformation that goes unregulated on social media sites like X, where publications and journalists have struggled to reach audiences. “They are hungry for the authoritative information that social media no longer provides, and for the array of perspectives from around the world that no single source will give you,” Semafor said.
As the digital news industry tries (and sometimes fails) to monetize outside of traditional advertising models, quite a few publications are experimenting with A.I. as an efficient way to scale up content production. Incorporating A.I. while maintaining journalistic ethics has become a recurring topic, as some publications, like Sports Illustrated, have been called out for publishing A.I.-generated articles without disclosure. Smith’s old employer BuzzFeed, which dissolved its newsroom last year, was also exposed for publishing A.I.-generated articles as bait for search engine optimization before the shutdown.
Tech companies seem eager to participate in the news industry, though with some challenges. For example, OpenAI already works with Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider, and Associated Press. But at the end of last year, The New York Times sued both OpenAI and its investor Microsoft for copyright infringement, saying the two companies owed “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” by using the Times content for training A.I. models. OpenAI published a response stating the lawsuit is without merit.
Former Times publisher Richard T. “Dick” Schlosberg III, who led the newspaper during an era that saw double-digit profits and the emergence of the internet, which would eventually decimate the industry, died Wednesday in San Antonio. He was 79.
The cause was brain cancer, according to his son, Dr. Richard T. Schlosberg IV.
Schlosberg spent a decade at The Times, arriving from the Denver Post in 1988 to serve as president and retiring as publisher in 1997. The paper was then the flagship of the Chandler family’s Times-Mirror chain and the nation’s second-largest metropolitan paper with a newsroom of 1,500 journalists and a circulation that topped 1 million. Reporters flew first class and Picasso lithographs adorned the walls of an executive dining room.
Schlosberg in an undated photo. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy.
(Schlosberg family)
“There are no bad days as publisher of the L.A. Times,” Schlosberg said in 1997. “There are good days and great days.”
To celebrate blockbuster ad revenues in the mid-1990s, The Times rented out the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip and hired the Laker Girls to perform. Schlosberg and then executive editor Shelby Coffey performed “Wild Thing” backed by a band.
“We weren’t without our troubles at various times and having to cut and squeeze, but certainly looking back on it… it was quite a high point,” Coffey said.
In one indication of the prestige afforded Times brass in that era, actor and singer Barbra Streisand invited Coffey and Schlosberg and their wives to her home for a dinner with actor Warren Beatty, which the former editor recalled as “a pleasant evening.”
Then Los Angeles Times publisher Richard T. Schlosberg, left, with David Laventhol, center, and President Clinton in 1994.
(Los Angeles Times History Center)
Meanwhile, the clouds gathered in Silicon Valley. Harry Chandler, then heading up business development, traveled to Palo Alto in 1995 to meet two Stanford graduates, David Filo and Jerry Yang, seeking funding for a new tech company.
On his return, he told Schlosberg and Coffey: “I need an hour to tell you what the internet is and why we should buy a company called Yahoo.”
The Times offered $1.6 million for about half the nascent company — an investment that would have drastically altered the newspaper’s history — but the Yahoo founders backed out.
Schlosberg was known for showing consideration to rank and file employees. He banned smoking in the Denver newsroom in the 1980s, citing the danger to nonsmokers, his son recalled, and in L.A., he sought out input for big decisions from low-level employees.
Schlosberg in 1996.
(Lee Salem Photography)
“He was a person who would always go to the source of information. He didn’t go through a typical chain of command in a way,” said Dickson Louie, who worked under him at The Times.
During Schlosberg’s tenure, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake and was a Pulitzer finalist nine times.
The son of a World War II pilot, Schlosberg was born in 1944 in Ardmore, Okla., and graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he flew more than 200 combat support missions, according to an obituary in the San Antonio Report. He received an MBA from Harvard before beginning a newspaper career.
Following his retirement from The Times, he served as CEO of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Los Altos-based charity set up by the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard and his wife.
He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Kathy, his son and his daughter Deb Rich Herczeg, as well as five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
After he left The Times, Schlosberg followed with concern as the paper cycled through different owners and many rounds of layoffs. Then-parent company Tribune filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and the newsroom dwindled below 400 journalists before the Soon-Shiong family returned the paper to local ownership in 2018.
Schlosberg and four others formed a committee to advocate for retired Times-Mirror employees and spent 15 years fighting for money due them under deferred compensation plans.
“It was on principle,” said former Times general counsel William Niese, who also worked on the committee. “Dick Schlosberg was a very wealthy man and he didn’t need to do it at all.”
Employees eventually collected about a third of what was owed them through the bankruptcy proceedings, Niese said.
The recently appointed Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) Normalisation Committee (NC) has got its tenure off the wrong foot, barely a month into office.
The Committee was appointed last month by FIFA, tasked to temporarily run football affairs in Zimbabwe after the country’s readmission from the FIFA family.
Zimbabwe was in the football wilderness after they were banned by FIFA owing to third-party interference emanating from the government’s suspension of the ZIFA board.
The Lincoln Mutasa-led team composed of Sikhumbuzo Ndebele, Rosemary Mugadza and Nyasha Sanyamandwe, is taking ‘dire decisions’ in its effort to normalise the country’s football situation after a turbulent period.
Since its appointment in mid-July, the committee has snubbed ZIFA offices, working from an isolated place in the central business district while the ZIFA secretariat is still based at the association’s offices at 53 Livingstone Avenue in Harare without water, wifi & operational funds.
According to information gleaned by NewZimbabwe.com the committee has moved into offices located in Harare’s CBD.
Furthermore, the offices are gobbling up exorbitant rental fees a month. The premise is reportedly owned by businessman Shingi Mutasa, believed to be Mutasa’s relative.
The Normalisation Committee was tasked to oversee the running of football in the country until next year when substantive elections are expected to be held.
FONDA — An Amsterdam wastewater treatment plant worker has been awarded $191,762 by a jury in state Supreme Court in Montgomery County, which found the city violated state law when officials terminated the man with a medical marijuana license for failing a drug test.
Attorneys for the city argued in court filings that the worker did not disclose his prescription, as required by employee policies, until he was suspended and then fired after failing a drug test in February 2020.
State law recognizes individuals prescribed medical marijuana as having a disability, which makes them members of a protected class safeguarded from employment discrimination.
The case was presented to a jury last week during a five-day trial before Judge Rebecca Slezak. The jury found in favor of Apholz on June 30, according to a press release issued by attorney Kevin Luibrand.
The outcome of the trial was first reported by The Times Union.
Beyond the $191,762 monetary award, Apholz is entitled to reinstatement to his former job at the wastewater treatment plant and recovery of his legal fees from the city based on the decision, according to the release.
“The jury found that senior Amsterdam city officials refused to provide Mr. Apholz an accommodation for his medical condition after he…
To understand why the New York Times could have made so much more money last year, it’s worth appreciating micropayments in the context of the Lightning Network.
We usually think of Lightning as a Bitcoin scalability solution as it makes everyday payments in bitcoin viable. Essentially, Lightning is a protocol built on top of the main Bitcoin network, and here, transaction costs are significantly lower and payment speeds are much, much faster. In fact, Lightning is significantly more efficient than even Visa and Mastercard.
“The network (Lightning) can also process millions of transactions per second (TPS), which is far and above Visa’s capacity for approximately 25,000 TPS. Solana, another competitor in the fast and cheap payments space, can only do 60,000 TPS. So Lightning has a significant advantage here.” — Nat Eliason
And Lightning still has plenty of room to grow. While this technology is still maturing — for example, with regards to security, privacy and adoption — it demonstrates very strong network effects: As more people start using it, the cheaper and faster payments will get. And remember: they cost merely a fraction of a penny already!
One of the most exciting things this opens up is micropayments — there’s not been sufficient talk about how exciting this prospect is, both economically and culturally.
It’s impossible to send very tiny amounts of money in our traditional centralized payment systems. Depending on which service you’re using and where you’re sending to, you won’t even be able to send 10 cents digitally. And this is for good reason: Very tiny amounts don’t make sense because the transaction cost itself might be larger than the amount you’re sending.
Lightning, on the other hand, makes it possible to send these small amounts digitally. And since it’s a technology that exhibits network effects, costs will drop further as more people start using it. You can digitally send fractions on the penny today via Lightning, and you’ll probably be able to send even smaller amounts in the future.
Now, let’s get to The New York Times. To understand why the NYT could make 50% more from Lightning maturing, let’s do some simple math.
A few straightforward facts:
The publication made $76 million in adjusted operating profit in the second quarter of 2022.
Let’s estimate that the NYT made about $25 million in profit in one month in 2021.
Hence, let’s extrapolate that on average, there were 115 million visitors every month to the NYT who were non-subscribers in 2021.
These non-subscribers can read a maximum of five articles every month.
(I’m going to be conservative with the math to not overstate how much the NYT would’ve earned in a scenario where a matured Lightning Network exists.)
Of these 115 million visitors, some read two articles, and some read the maximum of five. On average, each of these visitors ends up enjoying one article every month, and since it’s so easy and seamless to send tiny amounts of money to the NYT thanks to Lightning, every visitor could end up sending 10 cents that month. So that month, the NYT would have ended up making $11.5 million more. That’s 46% more in profit.
The math is elementary and imperfect, but it gets the point across: Micropayments open up a ton of potential. And their benefits don’t just end at helping content creators. They can also perpetuate cultural shifts and more, and I’ve put forth some examples below:
Regular people being charitable.
I think that many more folks, even if they’re struggling themselves, would be happy to give $0.01 to the disabled kid playing the clarinet on the street — if such giving was both convenient and possible.
Tipping bus drivers who are especially sweet.
Teachers sending tiny amounts of money to students in the classroom who raise their hands and try to answer questions.
Kids who genuinely try get one cent, even if their answer is wrong. If a kid gets it correct, congratulations! He/she gets five cents. (Remember teachers giving chocolates to students who got questions right? Well, they can’t turn up with chocolates all the time, so micropayments might be viable substitutes!) You might end up seeing a lot more hands in the air!
So now, try to extrapolate how many industries and sectors such micropayments could benefit and the subsequent contributions to GDP. Imagine NYT employees seeing their salaries go up. Imagine them then spending this money on new things. And then imagine the salaries of the people they bought from going up, too. And the process repeats, and here, we see economists’ beloved multiplier effect, which is amazing for the economy.
Micropayments prompt spending in a completely new way, so to Bitcoiners: next time you explain Lightning, don’t forget to talk about micropayments! It’s probably easier to digest than “scalability.”
And to economists skeptical of bitcoin: I’d think that you’d love something like this because it encourages spending. So, are you getting any softer on bitcoin yet?
