Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post on Wednesday. The paper survives as a husk, but the institution that became one of the cathedrals of world journalism is gone. The biggest mistake one could make in analyzing this corporate slaughter is to lay the blame solely on the state of journalism. That’d be wrong.

Times are hard in journalism, just like they always are. The big new problem is A.I. swallowing up search traffic, which itself had already sucked up the ad revenue that used to go to newspapers and magazines. Otherwise, all of the things that have been hard for the past 20 years are still hard now. Powerful corporate interests have captured great newsrooms, or run their own old family businesses into the ground. Fox News, social media, and podcasts—in that chronological order—have cocooned a lot of people to want only “news” that isn’t really news. Megyn Kelly is now a red-meat podcaster instead of an occasionally punchy Fox host.

The Post laid off 300 journalists on Wednesday. This included more or less the entire remaining staff of the paper’s legendary sports section, which produced several of the best writers to ever do the job. The days of the superstar columnist with the biggest megaphone in town were long gone, but the section remained tremendous. The paper slashed its international coverage, laying off a journalist who found out as she reported from Kyiv. Many editors across desks lost their jobs. Worst of all, not that it’s a contest, but the Washington Post will now be a lot less Washingtonian. The paper has fired at least a substantial chunk of its metro reporters, who serviced a city and region that have been under a multifront attack from the Trump administration.

In a stiff email, Post executive editor Matt Murray tried to make this move sound like yet another example of a tough business forcing tough decisions. “The ecosystem of news and information, on- and off-platform, is changing radically,” Murray wrote to his staffers, fired and not. He lamented the “serious decline” of search traffic. He wrote of increased competition from other people, other platforms.