The Washington Post’s travails are well known, but its admission of a $100M loss for this year has brought it back into sharp focus. Will the appointment of a new CEO, ex-Dow Jones Chief William Lewis, see a revival of its fortunes, or a further descent on the stairway to oblivion? Charles Benaiah posits his thoughts…..TL;DR: sue Charles, not us.
I feel for the folks at the Washington Post. Ten years ago, their ship was adrift. They were living off (even then) thirty-year-old past glories of their stellar Watergate reporting. I’ll give journalists credit. They have a knack of seeing the issues of the world everywhere but their own backyard.
“For much of the past decade, The Post has been unable to escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other ‘legacy’ media organizations. The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies, scattering readers and advertisers across a radically altered news and information landscape and triggering mergers, bankruptcies and consolidation among the owners of print and broadcasting properties.”
– Paul Farhi, Media Reporter, The Washington Post. 2013.
tl;dr. (mom, that means, too long; don’t/didn’t read). It said this: newspapers were local, losing money, and dying.
Enter the hero. Jeff Bezos. Even then, one of the richest dudes around. On August 5, 2013, Jeff bought the Post for $250M. People thought he was nuts. All people, except the journalists who work at the Post. As the sellers told their story, “The mood was hushed; several veteran employees cried.”
Almost immediately, Bezos Amazon-ed (v.) it up. He built software that helped run his newspaper. Then, he licensed those tools to other newspapers. The Trib paid him $100M to use his app. Jeff could lose money on news, but make money selling apps. Just like Amazon. Back then, Amazon lost money selling stuff and made money on the services that help you be in business — like, AWS.
Bezos made the Post the nation’s and world’s portal to DC. Along with the New York Times and LA Times, WaPo was one of the few papers that could survive. Their markets meant something to people everywhere.
For a while, things were humming along nicely. But, then, The Trib imploded. Most other newspaper chains did too. That meant the people who paid Bezos for his software couldn’t keep paying for his software. Selling services like AWS works because every kind of company needs internet plumbing. As one industry fails, another one rises. The newspaper industry was a small collection of mostly failing folks.
Fast forward to this year. The paper is struggling again. Because, well, it’s a paper. All the things Farhi wrote about in 2013 still exist. In fact, they’re worse.
In June, CEO Fred Ryan, announced he was leaving. He’d been there for nine of Bezos’s ten years. Numbers were in decline and the Post was back to laying people off.
So, the search was on for a new person. Someone who could fix the troubles at the Post amid a sea of troubles for all news in a Panthalassa for troubled media.
The process to find the right person took months. A big recruiting firm evaluated candidates. The interim CEO talked to industry insiders from Bloomberg, Politico, McClatchy, and the Atlantic. Oh, and the former head of the Texas Trib who left his post because his not-for-profit paper was failing and laying people off.
Huzzah. They found someone. Not just a dude, a Sir. He had been a reporter. Check. He had cleaned up the hacking scandal at The News in London. Check-ish. He had led the WSJ. Check. His biggest claim to business fame was that from 2014 to 2020, the WSJ added 1.3M digital subscribers.
Let’s put some context around Sir’s biggest business win. During his tenure at the Journal, tens of thousands of newsletters gained tens of millions of subscribers. Casey Newton alone has 100K+ subscribers on his Substack — Platformer. Netflix, Spotify, and other streamers gathered hundreds of millions of paid users. And TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other social platforms gained billions of users. But, hey, congrats for getting people to pay less for digital than for print. Kudos.
The business of news is failing. The Washington Post lost $100m last year and is in the midst of layoffs.
Yesterday, WaPo announced Sir what’s his name to the staff. Paul Farhi chronicled his hoped-for inspirational first words to worried staff, “I have ideals not ideas.”
Oblivious.
Charles Benaiah is the CEO of Watzan, a techy company for medical media. When he’s not running a media company, he reads about media, thinks about it, pull out what’s left of his hair dealing with it, and, then, he writes about it over on unCharles. Charles is a member of Media Makers Meet – Mx3 Collectif.
