From the ruins of the Washington Post, the new Washington Sun is born

On the bright side, Jeff Bezos’s dismantling of the Washington Post is giving rise to new newspapers, rather like the controlled burns that Aboriginal people carry out to regenerate the land and breathe new life into the plants of the future. For decades, the Washington Post held a monopoly in the District of Columbia, on the desks of the deep state, and in the driveways of homes from Georgetown to Anacostia. It was a local newspaper that covered the city without losing sight of its international and national role. With the massive cuts imposed by Amazon’s CEO and his drift towards Mar-a-Lago, many journalists have left – there has been talk of a mass exodus (over 300 journalists were made redundant). Some have launched their own Substack channels, while others have moved to The Atlantic or The New York Times. Some of them have been involved in a new publishing venture, created by a co-founder of Politico, Robert Allbritton. Having launched Notus (News of the World) three years ago, with the collapse of the Washington Post, Allbritton decided to try and fill the void, recruiting figures such as Dana Milbank and repositioning himself with a city-focused (online) daily: the Washington Sun.

They’ve even poached the capital’s team of meteorologists from the Washington Post. “People are hungry for news about local issues and sport,” said Allbritton, “following what happened to the Washington Post and regional newspapers across the country.” There has been talk of an “old-fashioned war between newspapers”, with Bezos returning to discuss his own paper, noting that this year has gone better than in recent years. “Washington will once again be a city with two daily newspapers,” wrote CNN media expert Brian Stelter, and we will all benefit from it.

The Sun was originally to be called the Washington Star, which was the name of an old newspaper, but following a legal dispute, the name ‘The Sun’ was chosen: “Here comes… The Sun”, wrote the New York Times. And some people reflected, with mixed feelings, on the words spoken by Barack Obama in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump’s election: “Whatever happens, the sun will rise again in the morning”.