You wrote to me in May — a young woman, journalism degree, University of Maryland, three internships, a student-loan balance you mentioned as though it were a credential. You asked whether the layoffs at the Post were “temporary” and whether the industry would “come back.” Pull up a chair. I’m going to answer your question, and you are going to wish I hadn’t.
The Post cut a third of its staff. 300 positions, gone on a Wednesday. The Associated Press cut 20 more last month — print revenue down a quarter in 4 years, pivoting to “visual journalism and technology clients.” California Post launched in January from the New York Post newsroom — a daily print edition, digital-first, staffed from the mothership. James Freeman, in the Journal, cites Cecilia Dobbs in Editor & Publisher arguing that journalism is not art but a science — “claiming otherwise is trying to have it both ways.” Freeman and Dobbs are correct. I commend them for stopping one sentence early. Journalism is not art. It is manufacturing. Manufacturing has a bill of materials. The bill of materials includes bodies. Let me show you what happens when the accountant reads that bill.
I own a content operation in Bataan — articles, SEO copy, the text you scroll past on your way to what you were looking for — and a moderation center in Manila. The woman loading the article queue in Bataan is named Luiza. She is seventeen. I pay her $9 a day. She produces search-optimized text at a pace that has already given her eyestrain bad enough that she fainted on the line in March. I docked the faint.
Now. Luiza is speed-limited to four articles an hour — five gave her migraines, and a migraine on the line costs me the rest of the shift — which means she produces 32 articles a day. Each one. Every day. No paid leave. No benefits. No byline. Her labor per article is $0.28 — the blue-light screen filter I declined was $4.12, fourteen articles’ worth of her, and I kept the fourteen. Each article is slightly worse than what a journalist would write, and none of the 32 will ever expose a public official, uncover a fraud, or protect a single person who needs protecting. But 32 a day is three times what my former journalist-employees produced at fifteen times the cost, and the margin is exquisite.
A journalist in Washington costs me roughly $300 a day in salary and benefits. Luiza costs $9. Each journalist I replace saves me $55,000 a year. Across the 300 positions Mr. Bezos cleared, that is $16.5 million in annual savings — roughly $300 a day, every day, for every body replaced with a body that costs less. I want you to see those numbers. They are not complicated. The quarterly improved.
I also run the moderation center in Manila, through a different subsidiary. Santos reviews flagged material — self-harm, child abuse, the worst of what the internet produces — at a pace of 600 items a shift. Her hands shake during the fifteen-minute break. She holds her coffee with both wrists, and the supervisor times the recovery because the line does not pause for tremors. I pay her $6 a day. She’ll be useless to me inside 18 months, when the exposure gives her sleep collapse and her screening threshold drops past the point where she can keep the pace, but the replacement is already training. Every search result you click, every article in your feed, every recommended link — produced by Luiza, filtered by Santos, priced where I want it. Your attention is the product. The content is the cost of extracting it. I keep the difference.
Now let me show you a different kind of column inch, because the same arithmetic runs through every piece of the information portfolio I acquire.
I acquired the Peoria Ridge Sentinel in 2019 through a holding company that shares an address with my poultry line and my e‑waste yard. Martin was a byline on that paper. A byline is a cost center with a headline. His cost center covered the school board, the planning commission, the grain‑elevator opening, the Legion fish fry, and the county sheriff’s budget, for $48,000 a year plus a $14,000 health‑insurance line — $62,000.00 all‑in. That’s $1.14 a column inch. Freeman’s essay in the Journal says journalism is a science. He’s describing the fill rate. The science is the fill rate, and the reagent is the byline, and a reagent that costs $1.14 is replaced when the market offers $0.03.
The replacement for Martin’s $1.14 was a public‑meeting transcription service at $127 a month and a language model licensed from a firm in Bangalore at $0.03 a column inch. Martin’s unit cost fell to $0.03; I pocketed $1.11 an inch. Multiply that .29‑cents‑per‑subscriber spread over 7,800 subscribers and 52 weeks and the annual spread is $117,624.00. I sent up a brief thanksgiving to the Lord for the repricing, then moved to the next column on the spreadsheet.
Martin’s wife’s medication copay under my PPO was $47 a month; now they are on the exchange at $360. His daughter’s albuterol inhaler was $68; it is $134 now. Those numbers do not trouble me — the ledger records them as a credit to the margin column, and a credit is a credit. Carson, who runs the Sentinel’s desk, presses a button at eleven p.m. and the AI generates the school‑board copy from the transcript, no comma splices, no health insurance, no daughter on inhaler. The quarterly editorial cost is $23,400.00, which is $38,600.00 less than Martin’s salary alone, and no one in the office has tracked the subscription‑renewal rate since his beat was removed. I haven’t looked. The dashboard is green, and the green is the only figure that pays the rent.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? (Matthew 20:15). Martin signed a contract that named the wage and named the beat, and the contract was extinguished when the market repriced the column inch. The parable permits no claim on the denarius after the ledger is closed. Martin’s complaint is envy, and envy is not a receivable.
Martin cashed out his 401(k) and is now filling out an application at a fulfillment center I own in southern Ohio. The warehouse runs at 59 degrees — one degree above the temperature at which fine motor function declines, zero degrees of comfort — and he will work there until his back fails, which will happen in the thirty‑sixth month, and the training he received was generated by the same model that wrote his old column, for $0.03 an inch.
Now pull back with me. The owner decided what the paper was worth. The journalists did not get a vote. What the market valued was not the paper but the extraction efficiency, and the market is correct. Each journalist replaced with a contractor saves $55,000, and three hundred of them is $16.5 million. The quarterly improved. The market lifted the valuation. There is another column — the one that tracks what was lost — but I haven’t opened it.
This same consolidation runs through every legacy information vertical in my portfolio. The AP cut 20. Every regional paper that cut a third of its staff. Every beat that was eliminated. The formula does not change: cut the expensive bodies, keep the infrastructure, pocket the margin. There is nothing on the balance sheet for what is lost — the investigation that will never be written, the corruption that will go unnamed, the civic accountability that evaporates when the ratio of bodies to oversight drops past the point where anyone asks what happened. The quarterly number moves. That is the column I watch.
Cato the Elder, in De Agri Cultura, Section 2.7, roughly 160 BCE, advised the estate owner, on inspecting his farm, to sell whatever was superfluous. His list is instructive. He includes worn‑out oxen, blemished cattle, old wagons, rusted iron tools — and the old slave, and the sickly slave. Sell the old slave, the sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The human being appears in the same sentence as the worn‑out plow. Filed under “sell whatever is superfluous,” because in the correct accounting the slave is an inventory item that ages. Cato was honest about it. Modern accounting does the same arithmetic and calls it “restructuring.”
“Vendat boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pellis, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et si quid aliut supersit, vendat.” — Cato the Elder, De Agri Cultura §2.7, c. 160 BCE
The body was the load‑bearing line item. It was also the easiest one to cut, because the owner decided what the paper was worth and the body had no vote. The extraction is clean. There is nothing on the balance sheet for what is lost: the investigation never written, the corruption unnamed, the civic accountability that dissolves when the ratio of bodies to oversight falls below the level at which anyone asks what happened. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away (Matthew 25:29). I have always read this as a quarterly forecast.
You asked whether the industry would come back. The number moves. The hands always stay.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.