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/...
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.
- 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.