Member Newsletter
A number of you have asked me to share my thoughts on abrupt shake-up at The Washington Post in which Executive Editor Sally Buzbee was abruptly forced out by turnaround CEO Will Lewis. I don’t know enough about the situation at the Post to add more than you’re hearing from other commentary. There are a lot of things that look bad and I’m fairly confident they are bad. But I don’t know the backstory or details well enough to do more than repeat widely shared impressions. But I have a few ancillary observations.
The first is a simple pattern, not terribly surprising, but still worth absorbing. We’ve seen a series of billionaires get into the news business by purchasing for-profit news entities with what seems like the implicit promise that their vast resources will allow them to focus on journalistic excellence even if that means running losses which the new owner can cover without much difficulty. This seemed like the Bezos concept. He bought the Post when it was seriously on the ropes and when its longtime family owners (the Graham family) simply didn’t have the resources to get the paper back to profitability or to secure its place as one of the 3-to-4 national U.S. newspapers.
This is something like Laurene Powell’s mission with the Emerson Collective, which owns The Atlantic and other publications and Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network/First Look Media. LA Times’ owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is in the same broad category. To be clear, these are very differently organized efforts. They range from simple for-profit ownership to quasi-non-profithood with “entrepreneurial” sparkle dust thrown on. But none are purely charitable and none of the four got into journalism as a major money maker for their already ample fortunes. Some vision of public stewardship appeared to be involved in each case.
In each we’ve seen a basic pattern: the billionaire eventually gets tired of losing money. On one level, of course they do. That’s just donor fatigue. But not exactly. These aren’t truly charitable efforts. And the funder/owners have more than enough money to sustain the losses forever. But money-losing businesses just don’t sit right with them. It’s not in their DNA. It’s not surprising. These people come out of the world of business. They’re not third generation descendants of business founders.
Again, this is not a huge surprise, but it’s worth noting for those of us who think about businesses. And to be fair, if the Post is really losing $70 million a year, that’s a lot of money. If that’s more than just one really bad year the new execs are right that that is totally unsustainable and they need to make big changes. But the go-go, razmataz world salad from the new bosses doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that they’re going to do it with good motives or with an attempt to solve the problem in a good way.
Second, the Brits. British journalism is just a very sketchy world. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean this journalistically but also in terms of business, though I’m less versed in that part of it. And this is quite apart from the Murdoch domination of the British journalism world. When I was beginning my journalism career and did a lot more international and national security reporting, I realized very quickly and really to my surprise that even what I had understood to be prestige British dailies routinely crossed all sorts of ethical lines. Some of the big ones were pretty openly known as open for business to foreign intelligence services that wanted to place stories. (The Guardian here seems to be the exception among major British papers, and it’s ownership structure is different.) I’m not looking to pick fights here. I don’t apply this to all British journalists. I say this with up-close awareness of all the big problems with American journalism. But for all the many problems of American journalism, British journalism is not a pretty picture. You might take your actors and musicians and writers from the UK and think their accents just give them some special edge. Not journalism. Not a pretty picture. An increasing number of major U.S. publications have recently come under executive leadership by Brits, often from the Murdoch world. That’s not a great development. That applies in spades to The Wall Street Journal, to CNN (though perhaps less damagingly) and now the Post. The recent shake-up has put the whole operation under the management of UK newspaper execs.
Again, I’m certainly not saying this is a negative in every case. But suspicion is merited.
Final point. I’ve discussed a lot over the years the core dynamic behind the decline of the American journalism business. It’s not “the internet.” It’s that the Internet robbed American newspapers of their geographical monopolies of commercial speech in their zones of operation. Hard news and certainly political news were essentially loss-leaders funded by the funnies, the crossword, sports, the metro columnists and more. Take away those monopolies and everything falls apart.
The news publications that are now making the finances work at scale are those that can command sufficient time-attention apart from hard news and politics to be able to fund hard news and politics. Last month I saw this post at the gaming site Kotaku which noted that, in terms of time spent, the Times is now more a gaming company than a news company. I found that to be a truly amazing statistic. And it’s a testament to Times news executives in keeping the hoary crossword chunking, making a brilliant strategic investment in Wordle and then adding more similarly addictive things on top of that. Obviously, time spent isn’t the only or best metric. But it’s a pretty important one. If that’s what holding the most Times’ attention-minutes, that must be a huge, huge data point and certainly critical to sustaining lots of subscriptions.
This comes back to the big journalism killer: social media sites created a way of holding readers’/users’ attention time without the need to create any news content at all. We still don’t have a good way of making news widely economically viable in that reality.