Member Newsletter
We’ve now got the brass’s take on the shake-up at The Washington Post via Dylan Byers at Puck. I subscribe to Puck, and some of the people there are extremely good. Others I read because I want to know what *those* people are thinking. Dylan Byers is in that category for me. He covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism kind of way. William Cohan covers the titans for Puck too. But I always learn a lot from his reports. Byers is out now with his report on what happened. In his version of events, Buzbee, the departed executive editor, was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, the kind of serious and well-meaning editor you’d expect at the head of a dying institution. Indeed, she was so not a player that, in his account, she participated in the planning for the Post’s new direction, creating a “third newsroom” and such, without realizing until the last minute that it was in part an effort to ease her out. So not a player.
If you’re a subscriber, read his account and if you’re not I think you can read the article by, like, giving them your email. The are two points which suffuse his account and which he in various places states explicitly. The first is that the British newspaper execs have “swagger” and the current Post lacks “swagger” and needs it desperately. Buzbee is a fine editor but lacks “swagger.” She came from the AP, as he notes. How can you have less “swagger”? The second is that the Biden era is boring — “somnolent,” as he puts it — and lacks the “go-go” excitement of the Trump era.
(For a very different take, see this piece in the Times which notes that a clash over the new boss’s role in the notorious British phone hacking scandal preceded the shake up.)
Those two assumptions, premises, of Byers’ piece make my stomach curdle. (I’m big on illness metaphors at the moment; I’m at home in bed sick.) Again, I read folks like Byers because I want to know what “those people” are thinking. And we can still learn some things, pluck insights out of the dross. As Byers notes, the answer from many at the Post and many journalism types to the claim that the Post has lost its way is that they’ve won a bunch of Pulitzers under Buzbee. That’s not a good answer. Pulitzers are great. They reward quality journalism. But they are by no means a measure of whether you are producing an engaging and useful product for your audience. Many Pulitzer winning series are conceived and planned specifically to harvest awards. Those are produced for the Pulitzer board, not the audience. It’s also true that Buzbee is coming after Marty Baron, who is a genuinely legendary editor.
The problem with all these takes and critiques is that they act as though there’s no context to any of this, as though the fall-off in audience and subscriptions was not an industry-wide phenomenon starting at the beginning of 2021. It exposes a critical gap of moral imagination to see the Biden era principally as sleepy or boring. Yes, the Trump era was exciting and newsy, like living in a home with an abuser. The Biden era is less fraught. But the drop-off in news readership/viewership was driven in large part because people thought they didn’t have to worry quite as much about the new terrible thing that was going to happen at any moment. They got Biden in and he’d take care of things. They could take a break. The related factor that the journalism business, as well as American civic life, has had to grapple with is that people simply got exhausted. A lot of people who had been regular news consumers through much of their lives decided that the toxicity of American public life was poisoning their personal or inner lives and they tuned out.
If you’re wondering where I’m getting this stuff: I have interacted with many readers via email over many years and this is my takeaway based on those conversations. I did no formal study, but this was not just a few stray anecdotes. It’s the upshot of hundreds of conversations over the years in question. It’s a very clear and consistent pattern.
My own take on all of this is that the Post benefited greatly from the Trump era and then got hit hard by its end and the various factors I’ve noted above. But unlike many other publications, Bezos’s wealth gave the Post more ability to let things ride. So they didn’t make big changes as quickly as many other publications had to. And to be clear, those changes weren’t necessarily the smart-guy changes that would re-add swagger and make everything awesome. They were probably just cutting a lot of jobs and stopping the hemorrhaging of money. But not just that. Necessity drives creativity. It forces you to come up with new ideas because you have no choice.
Which brings us to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire savior whose wealth was supposed to solve all these problems. It’s his impatience with the losses which must be driving this whole train. But he’s been almost invisible in the coverage. A bit more on that later.