The Paper That Forgot Its Town

Cedar Valley News – February 9, 2026
The Paper That Forgot Its Town
By: Teresa Nikas, Editor
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post fired more than 300 journalists. On Thursday, its CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, was photographed on the red carpet at a celebrity gala in San Francisco. On Saturday, he resigned.

In Cedar Valley, we have a word for a man who fires the people doing the work and then goes to a party. We do not print it in this paper. But we know what it means.

Let me lay out the facts. Jeff Bezos — worth more than $200 billion — bought the Post in 2013. For a time, he invested in it. The paper grew and won Pulitzer Prizes under executive editor Marty Baron. Then something changed.

In October 2024, Bezos killed the paper’s planned presidential endorsement. The Post had endorsed in every race for decades. The editorial page editor resigned. More than 375,000 subscribers canceled. The paper lost $100 million in revenue. In February 2025, Bezos ordered the editorial page refocused on “personal liberties and free markets” — a direction NPR reported was far less likely to produce criticism of President Trump. Another editor walked out. Subscribers kept leaving.

Will Lewis arrived from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire with controversy already attached — accused of involvement in covering up the phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch’s British tabloids. He promised radical innovation. He delivered two years of turbulence, one all-staff meeting, and silence.

Last Wednesday, executive editor Matt Murray told the newsroom over a mandatory Zoom call that one in three employees was gone. The sports section — eliminated. The books section — closed. The Cairo bureau — shuttered. The entire Middle East team — fired. One war correspondent received her termination email while reporting from an active combat zone. The metro desk — the backbone of any newspaper that serves an actual city — was cut from more than forty reporters to roughly a dozen.

Lewis did not attend the call. Marty Baron called it “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” The Washington Post Guild called Lewis’s departure “long overdue” and said his legacy was “the attempted destruction of a great American journalism institution.”

Saturday evening, Lewis sent a brief email. Called his tenure “two years of transformation.” Bezos issued a statement praising new leadership and said, “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.”

The data. Not the duty. Not the mission. Not the people of Washington, D.C., who depend on a metro desk to tell them what their city council did last Tuesday. The data!

A newspaper is not a data set. A reader is not a click. A reporter sitting through a four-hour zoning meeting on a Wednesday night is not a line item on a spreadsheet. She is the only reason anyone in that room behaves. She is the reason the building inspector does not look the other way. She is the reason the school board does not quietly cut a program nobody will notice until their children come home with nothing to do.

When Jeff Bezos says the data will tell him where to focus, he is telling you he does not understand what a newspaper does. Or worse — he understands perfectly and has decided it is not worth the cost. He could fund the Post’s losses for a hundred years and never notice. He chose not to. Will Lewis could have stood before his newsroom and shared the weight. He chose a red carpet. Matt Murray could have resigned rather than deliver the cuts. He did not.

Character is not what you say in a press release. Character is what you do when the cost of doing right is personal and uncomfortable. Last week, the leaders of one of America’s most important newspapers showed us their character. It was not complicated. It was just empty.

In Cedar Valley, I run a small paper. I sit at a desk by the front window. I answer the phone. I go to the meetings nobody else attends. Nobody is going to buy this paper and hollow it out. Nobody is going to fire the reporters — because I am the reporter, and Caleb sets the type, and Dan drops copies at the diner before the coffee is ready. That is not a business model. It is a covenant.

Here is what I want to say on this Monday morning. Read your local paper. If you have one, pay for it. The people who write it are not getting rich. They are showing up because they believe your town matters enough to be told the truth about itself.

Democracy does not die in darkness. It dies in indifference. It dies when a billionaire decides his newspaper is a burden. It dies when a CEO goes to a party instead of facing the people he failed. And it dies a little every time a reader says local news does not matter.

It matters. The people who write it matter. And the towns that lose both do not get either one back easily.

Let us not be one of those towns.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Want to know the full story behind Cedar Valley? Teresa, Caleb, Dan, and the community you’ve come to know in these editorials first came together in Quiet Echor. Discover how a small town found its way from fear to fellowship — one quiet act of courage at a time. Available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3ME4nSs

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