We were in the nation’s capital shooting video for a documentary. A friend with connections was kind enough to arrange the walk-through of the Post.
Our guide was a midlevel editor, a guy in his early 60s who had the grizzled veteran journalist bit down cold. This was still relatively early in Amazon multi-multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the paper.
At the time, Bezos was pumping a flood of cash into his new acquisition. The editor showed us a newsroom outfitted with more technology than a NASA control center. He talked about how the Post was hiring new reporters at a steady clip, beefing up its coverage of Donald Trump’s first presidency.
Everything seemed golden.
After the tour, when the students walked off in search of restrooms, I asked the editor if Bezos was the answer to newspaper journalism’s problems.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening.
“No,” he said. “He’ll realize this is harder than it looks, get bored and move on.”
I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since the news broke that the Post would be laying off hundreds of journalists and eliminating entire sections of the paper.
I’m not sure our tour guide was right in the particulars. I consider it more likely that Bezos realized owning the Post would prove to be more costly than anticipated—he lost billions of dollars of federal government contracts during Trump’s first presidency—than that he grew bored with the enterprise.
Either way, the result was the same. The guy who bankrolled the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” efforts by the Post to hold Trump accountable in his first term morphed into the sycophantic plutocrat who contributed to Trump’s second inaugural and plunged $70 million into Melania Trump’s vanity-project documentary.
And the Post—the paper of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein and Ben Bradlee—found itself gutted like a freshly caught fish.
This is tragic while still being entirely predictable.
Much of the infatuation with the early Bezos era with the Post drew upon the spurious myth of the beneficent billionaire. The idea was that Bezos was rich enough to care about funding quality journalism for its own sake without worrying about whether the Post turned a profit.
The problem with that bit of pleasant mythology is that guys such as Bezos don’t become as rich as they are by ignoring the bottom line.
Ever.
When confronted with a choice between making more billions through other ventures and preserving the Post’s integrity, he always was going to opt for the former and serve up the latter on a platter.
A lot of Post readers have responded to the cuts with cancelled subscriptions and demands that Bezos sell the paper.
Good luck with that.
The cancelled subscriptions fall most heavily on the people still working there. Bezos’ net worth is around $250 billion—or roughly 1,000 times what he paid for the Post in 2013. As far as he’s concerned, the Post’s value is the equivalent of a rounding adjustment on his personal balance sheet.
And the demands that he sell the Post?
Well, who would buy it?
Bezos bought the paper for $250 million 13 years ago, but—given that it lost more than $175 million over the past two years—it’s hard to believe that it’s worth anywhere near that much now.
If someone new did come to own it, he or she would be signing up to lose millions, year after year after year.
Not an alluring prospect.
There are a lot of nonprofit journalism startups attempting to plug holes in news coverage appearing around the country—all of them swearing they’ll listen to and pay closer attention to their audience.
I’m not sure that’s the problem.
One of the sites the editor showed us on that tour of the Post was a system of tracking exactly what the paper’s readers liked and didn’t like.
It didn’t seem to help.
Part of the problem may be inherent in journalism’s mission.
At some point, every news operation brings its audience news that audience does not want to hear.
That can be a tough sell.
But it’s an essential one, because whatever other mistakes the Post and its owner may have made, they were right about one thing.
Democracy does die in darkness.
