More thinking about the Washington Post earthquake

If the billionaire sells the newspaper, what business model will a new owner embrace?

OK, is there anyone else online today — a few of you may read this post while waiting to vote — who is old enough to remember the famous National Lampoon cover with the headline, “If You Don’t Buy this Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”?

The art showed a cowering dog with a pistol aimed at his head. This wasn’t subtle satire.

I thought about that image as the online world continued to debate the decision by billionaire Jeff Bezos to act like he owns The Washington Post (consider the famous quotation, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”).

If Bezos decides that it’s time to sell the Post, which is currently swimming in a sea of red ink, the staff (no matter who wins the White House) may want to contemplate offering its own version of that image in an attempt to land more cash-paying readers. Then again, maybe Laurene Powell Jobs — the widow of the late Apple czar — will buy the newspaper and create a journalistic marriage (politically and spiritually speaking) with The Atlantic.

I also thought of the National Lampoon cover when I saw the readership stats for my recent Rational Sheep post, “Jeff Bezos tells readers: You don't own me — With the Washington Post in freefall, its owner thinks twice about preaching to the choir.” That post was, you see, sent to the small list of paid-option readers. This Substack project is doing a bit better there, but the “paid” list is still 5% of the “free” list, which is way below the norm on this digital platform. That said, let me offer an enthusiastic “Thank You!” to the folks who, in the past week, allowed us to reach 5%.

So much of what is happening in news and commentary these days is linked to (a) the struggle to find readers willing to support the creation of new material, while (b) publishers refuse to let the partisan desires of those subscribers hold veto power over what publications cover and what they ignore.

This leads me to a pair of must read commentaries — out of the kazillions published — about the clash between Bezos and the Post newsroom activists. First, consider this Providence essay by scholar Paul Marshall, a long-time friend and colleague who is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. The headline: “Media Strife Over Presidential Endorsements Is Largely an Internecine Affair.” Here is a key passage, about the strife at the Post and The Los Angeles Times over cancelled presidential endorsement editorials:

There is rampant speculation as to why these decisions were made. One favorite is that both men were afraid of upsetting Trump because of possible retaliation against their business interests should he be elected. Robert Kagan told The Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, the very same day the endorsement was killed, was proof of their scheme. 

Something like this might be true of Bezos, but Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, a professed left-wing activist, says that the decision was made because of Harris’ support for Israel, especially concerning the war in Gaza. She insisted that “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate.” However, her father denies this. 

Other media outlets smelled blood in the water. Guardian US editor Betsy Reed almost immediately “emailed readers touting her publication’s Harris endorsement the previous week and soliciting membership support.” This drew in $1.1 million, the Guardian‘s largest single-day yield for its US operation. 

Much of the extensive media coverage of these media decisions has consisted of media people interviewing media people, often about the views and actions of other media people.

The basic business model, in this era in which niche or even advocacy model journalism has become the norm: Please the paying customer. What is the newsroom bottom line?

Marshall asked this blunt question:

Is there anyone in America with more than two neurons to rub together and who reads newspapers who doesn’t already know who the Post and the LA Times want for President? We can ask the same question concerning conservative outlets such as the Washington Times and New York Post. (The NY Post did make it easier by actually endorsing Trump last week.) Everyone who is interested in such things already knows their editorial line simply from reading them. 

What happens next?

Is the Bezos revolt a sign that the people who own printing presses (it’s a metaphor) have reason to ponder a return to the old-liberal American Model of the Press? For young readers, this was a business and editorial model driven by a commitment to attempting (yes, “attempting”) to offer accurate, fair-minded, even balanced coverage of competing voices on hot-button issues (even those linked to the doctrines of the Sexual Revolution).

If you want a summary of that journalism model, please see this rather large chunk of one of my core lectures at the old Washington Journalism Center program (.pdf here).

Trigger warning! There is some history in this text:

Under the old-school American Model, how do journalists know when they are getting the job done right?

Journalists at the Poynter Institute in Florida have long used a helpful term — “stakeholders” — in these discussions. They define a “stakeholder” as someone whose life is going to be directly impacted by a particular news story. These people are directly involved in the story and they will often have strong, one-sided opinions. Nevertheless, when stakeholders keep saying that your coverage is inaccurate, that’s bad. When stakeholders consistently tell you that your coverage is biased against one group or another, it’s important to hear them and look into whether or not they are speaking the truth.

Where did the American model come from?

In the mid 19th century or so, printing presses began to speed up as technology improved. The impact was easy to see in Lower Manhattan, where there were a wide variety of newspapers being published for different audiences.

Ponder this question: If you had a slow printing press — printing 10,000 copies or thereabouts — how would you make the most money? You would focus on a very specific audience, allowing advertisers direct access to those customers. Thus, New York City had a variety of products, with newspapers for the wealthy and for laborers, addressing the lives of blacks and as well as Latinos, Christians and Jews. In terms of politics, there were liberal and conservative dailies.

This affected newspaper content, of course, as editors focused on the needs and views of their niche audiences. It was crucial to please the target audience. If there was a labor strike, readers at the start of the 20th Century would see very different coverage in The New York Call, a socialist newspaper, than in The Wall Street Journal. This editorial approach made financial sense. Eventually, printing presses began to gain speed, allowing publishers to target larger, more diverse audiences with advertising and news.

What happened next?

One of my graduate-school professors at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the great James Carey, used to put it this way in his famous seminar on the impact of the printing press: “Technology shapes content.” Carey was also known for his years of work teaching journalism at Columbia University in New York City.

With faster presses, it eventually made sense to offer news coverage that would appeal to people on both sides of big issues in city, state and national life. Eventually, wire services, newspaper chains and broadcasting networks strengthened this emerging approach to the business of news.

The American Model fit well with other American values — promoting a lively public square in which citizens could believe that their views would be treated with respect. It was possible, reading coverage over a period of time, to see which newsrooms were striving to be accurate and fair-minded. This approach meshed with a liberal approach to the First Amendment, as well.

Now, if you think that was too much information, check out this MASSIVE library of materials from New York Magazine, published under this double-decker headline:

Can the Media Survive?

Big tech, feckless owners, cord-cutters, restive staff, smaller audiences … and the return of print?

What is included in this digital tsunami? Check this out.

On and off the record with:

Imran Amed, founder and editor-in-chief, The Business of Fashion. | Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. | Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO, The Daily Wire. | Graydon Carter, founder and co-editor, Air Mail. | Sewell Chan, executive editor, Columbia Journalism Review. | Leroy Chapman Jr., editor-in-chief, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. | Charlamagne tha God, co-host, The Breakfast Club; founder, the Black Effect Podcast Network. | Eva Chen, vice-president of fashion, Meta. | Joanna Coles, chief creative and content officer, The Daily Beast. | Kaitlan Collins, anchor, CNN’s The Source. | Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor, the New York Times. | Mathias Döpfner, CEO, Axel Springer SE. | Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief, ProPublica. | Bryan Goldberg, CEO, Bustle Digital Group. | Emily Greenhouse, editor, The New York Review of Books. | Glenn Greenwald, host, System Update; co-founder, The Intercept. | John Harris, co-founder and global editor-in-chief, Politico. | Radhika Jones, editor-in-chief, Vanity Fair. | Almin Karamehmedovic, president, ABC News. | Jon Kelly, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Puck. | Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief, Apple News. | Gayle King, co-host, CBS Mornings. | Jessica Lessin, founder and editor-in-chief, The Information. | Hamish McKenzie, co-founder, Substack. | Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. | Kevin Merida, former executive editor, the Los Angeles Times. | John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief, Bloomberg. | Janice Min, founder and CEO, Ankler Media. | Neal Mohan, CEO, YouTube. | Matt Murray, executive editor, the Washington Post. | Samira Nasr, editor-in-chief, Harper’s Bazaar. | Mel Ottenberg, editor-in-chief, Interview. | Bill Owens, executive producer, CBS’s 60 Minutes. | Jonah Peretti, co-founder and CEO, BuzzFeed, Inc. | Jimmy Pitaro, chairman, ESPN. | Ramesh Ponnuru, editor, National Review. | Keith Poole, editor-in-chief, the New York Post Group. | Betsy Reed, editor, The Guardian US | Alison Roman, writer and chef. | Maer Roshan, co-editor-in-chief, The Hollywood Reporter. | Carolyn Ryan, managing editor, the New York Times. | Ben Shapiro, host, The Ben Shapiro Show; co-founder, The Daily Wire. | Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor, the New York Times; founding editor, New York Times Cooking. | Bill Simmons, founder and managing director, The Ringer; head of podcast innovation and monetization, Spotify. | Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Semafor. | Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder and editor-at-large, the New York Times’ DealBook; co-anchor, CNBC’s Squawk Box. | Simone Swink, senior executive producer, ABC’s Good Morning America. | Jake Tapper, anchor and chief Washington correspondent, CNN. | Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic. | Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief, The Wall Street Journal. | Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO, Axios; co-founder, Politico. | Bari Weiss, founder and editor, The Free Press. | Will Welch, global editorial director, GQ and Pitchfork. | Gus Wenner, CEO, Rolling Stone. | Michael Wolff, author. | Matthew Yglesias, writer, Slow Boring; co-founder, Vox.com. | Jeff Zucker, CEO, RedBird IMI.

Yes, there are very few conservatives, or old-school liberals, in that giant list. Nevertheless, that is really impressive.

The goal of the project was to “understand how the news media is surviving in a time of imploding business models and record public distrust. We gathered 57 of the most powerful people in media — and rather than simply anoint them, we put them to work. What follows is a tour through the state of journalism, assembled from dozens of hours of extremely candid conversations.”

There is no way to summarize the contents of this project. Nevertheless, here are two important samples:

Everybody Is Jealous of the New York Times.

It’s a tale of two cities. It’s almost like it’s the one percent and the 99 percent,” says a journalist surveying the field beyond the Times’ walled garden. As the rest of the industry scrambles for scraps, the Times has become the Amazon of legacy media — an everything store for blue-state America’s information needs (and more). “They’ve got Wordle and all the journalism,” says Hamish McKenzie. “Almost all the journalism talent and quality gets sucked up because it’s becoming the megalith, the giant in the room that can’t be stopped.”

“They sit on 10 million paid subs; that’s unlikely to dwindle. That’s just a very powerful base to operate from,” notes one rival editor-in-chief. “They figured it out first — how to make a killing off recipes and games that could sustain the rest of their journalism,” says former CNN boss Jeff Zucker. It’s gotten to the point that, according to one estimate, the Times now employs some 7 percent of newspaper journalists nationwide. “When other people are doing something better, they hire their people away,” says a digital media executive.

Right now, the Times is so far ahead it’s hard to imagine anybody catching up. “There’s a conversation that comes up all the time with people starting or working in journalistic enterprises, which is, ‘What’s going to be our Wordle?’” says Bari Weiss. And can anybody else do that? “Not to pick on the Times, but every answer to success can’t be, ‘Let’s point to the Times,’” says another media executive. “You’re not going to be able to replicate the Times’ success.” Just look at the new supersize app, which combines all of the paper’s many offerings. “It’s like, ‘Our newsroom of 2,000 people is just one of ten things you can be choosing,’” says an editor-in-chief.

But Not Necessarily for Its Journalism.

“I envy their business model; I don’t envy their newsroom. I think it’s bloated and kind of self-indulgent,” says a top newspaper editor.

“They pivoted from being a newspaper for everyone to being a newspaper for their core reader,” says Bustle’s Bryan Goldberg. “From a purely business standpoint, that was the right decision, but I also think it made the world a much worse place, and that’s a difficult thing to reconcile.”

Some are eager to (anonymously) second-guess the Times’ business decisions, too. “They’ve been terrible with podcasts for the most part,” says one media executive. “They spent $550 million on The Athletic when they could have just spent $100 million and gotten all the best sportswriters. It’s like, Oh, you guys don’t know what you’re doing.”

But a lot of that just feels like sour grapes. “It’s amazing to me that they’re the piñata of American journalism,” says Stephen Engelberg. “Whatever they write, somebody’s constantly whacking. They do more good stories in a week than many of us do in months. And you have to tip your hat to people who can get inside the Supreme Court in real time. That’s really something.”

“Part of the problem in the media business has been the collapse of brands, and the Times has managed to maintain its,” says Michael Wolff. For a journalistic buccaneer like Wolff, the operations of that brand machinery feel soul-crushing. “You want to work at the Times? I’d rather kill myself.” The feeling is likely mutual.

As I frequently tweet at X, when cynically responding to important events or trends in Heartland America: “What does @NYTimes say?”

That long New York Magazine passage was a meditation on the elites in the deepest of deep-blue zip codes and the liberal readers elsewhere who hold digital Gray Lady subscriptions as (a) a commitment to the true New York City faith or (b) a statement (tmatt raises his hand) that, like it or not, we simply have to read what is published in the Pravda of the principalities and powers that lead The Cathedral (that term is a nod to mystic Paul Kingsnorth) that runs America.

But what about, you know, ordinary people “out there” in nowhere land?

There Has to Be a Way for Local News to Survive.

“We have to be careful about not using the ‘in peril’ narrative too much, where people will think it’s already all dead and there’s nothing left to save,” says CJR’s Sewell Chan, who spent three years running the nonprofit Texas Tribune. Chan points to two bright spots in efforts to support local news: the National Trust for Local News, which acquires vulnerable community papers and invests in their development, and the American Journalism Project, which tries to rebuild local news by seeding local digital start-ups.

Audience interest in local stories is high, Apple News has found. “That’s part of what we’re trying to do — connect local news outlets with their audiences again,” says Lauren Kern of Apple News. “After the Apalachee school shooting earlier this fall, we relied on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for coverage,” she notes. “The North Dakota state abortion ban was ruled unconstitutional, and we have the North Dakota Monitor to literally put at the top of a national news app.”

Among other experiments are small, sometimes worker-owned or nonprofit newsrooms around the country. San Francisco has 27 news organizations — about the same as it had a decade ago, thanks to a mix of nonprofits, radio stations, and, yes, the largesse of various rich people, of which the city has no shortage. In New York, there’s the swashbuckling Hell Gate and the more self-serious nonprofit The City. But there’s also the Murdoch-owned New York Post, which has survived by becoming, as its editor Keith Poole puts it, “a national digital brand.” That means it peddles national news, tabloid sensationalism, gossip, and Fox News–adjacent talking points that make it sometimes seem to despise the very city it’s based in. “We have to treat our news very differently locally and nationally. Not all readers will necessarily be interested in education policy in New York City,” Poole says. “We’re profitable — little-known fact. We’ve been profitable for the last three years in a row.”

The biggest threat to local news is hedge funds like Alden Global Capital that have gobbled up and then gutted regional papers across the country. “These are either zombie newspapers or soon-to-be-zombie newspapers. I don’t know if they’re going to make it,” says Stephen Engelberg.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though, is owned by Cox Enterprises, a family-owned company that gave the paper a multiyear building plan. “There’s a difference between managing decline and investing in transformation,” says editor Leroy Chapman Jr. But, by and large, “the business model for local news is broken. It really is,” he adds. “There has to be, among the public and among elected officials, a recognition of how vital local news is to thriving communities” and “public investment” in protecting it. “We need some help to have a business model that lets us recoup fairly what we should, based upon what we produce, and that will provide the sort of thing our democracy needs, which is objective fact.”

There is so much more to read in that project. Does anyone know if it will come out in an ink-on-paper edition?

No matter who wins this election, what Americans learn about “What comes next?” will come from elite newsrooms or the digital rebels that are trying to bring them down. Who has the clout to seriously challenge The Cathedral?

Did the leaders of New York Magazine consider talking to Joe Rogan?