Bafflement with Bezos – FRESH HELL Tina Brown’s Diary
The whole debacle of Washington Post brand hara-kiri last week, the myth that a tech billionaire could save serious journalism was busted. Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because it was a fat holding that would absorb losses, but because we believed his Amazon magic was transferable to journalism’s degraded business model. This man was a digital titan, for goodness sake. He started selling books online from his garage in Bellevue, Washington, and grew it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a side business of Blue Origin suborbital rockets. He would surely find new and innovative ways to connect the Washington Postrigorous reporting with hungry new audiences.
But last week’s blazing self-immolation, when the Washington Post staff summarily cut by a third, including 300 journalists in newsrooms, its sports and literary sections thrown overboard (this, from the world’s largest bookseller), and its foreign coverage gutted—revealed the harsh truth that Bezos no more understands how to run a news agency than Woodward and Bernstein could understand how to deliver dog food to your door by drone. His statement last week doubled down on his continued incomprehension. “Every day, our readers give us a road map to success,” he proclaimed. “Data tells us what is valuable and what to focus on. » No, it’s not the data that tells us that, Jeff. It is the intelligence and initiative of journalists who research stories that readers I didn’t know and the publishers who push them to do so. It’s about beating the competition with shitty scoops that make readers stop what they’re doing and start triggering their text chains. It’s about exploring the way we live today with preventative information that readers are just beginning to identify with. Daniel Keel, founder of a successful international publishing house, once said of the fight against deadly data enslavement: “Reason and rationality may pursue us, but we are faster. »
The fashion to view traditional media as a dinosaur business extinguished by the headwinds of change fails to ask why. Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has managed to revitalize this leading journal and pay attention to data as an indicator of engagement, without the gross incompetence displayed during the Washington Post. Or how New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, working with consistency and care alongside Publisher AG Sulzberger and Editor-in-Chief Joe Kahn, continues to roll out a coolly considered audience-driven strategy with a monstrous base of 12.7 million subscribers.
Bezos, however, proved to be a master of disaster when it came to building a leadership team within the company. Job. Even the formidable editorial muscle of Marty Baron (hired by Katharine Weymouth, the last Graham family publisher) couldn’t hide forever the flabby business management of Bezos’ CEO/publisher appointment Fred Ryan, a Reagan-era Washington establishment figure who was the wrong member of Politico’s upper echelon to steal from. Ryan’s hiring spree, triggered by Trump’s arrival, was reminiscent of Peloton’s cratering strategy of banking on the permanence of the Covid home exercise boom. To replace Ryan, Bezos was dazzled by one of the media industry’s biggest crooks: British newspaper buccaneer and former Dow Jones CEO Sir (an honorific bestowed by fellow bloviator Boris Johnson) Will Lewis. I was stunned when I learned that Lewis was in contention to lead the championship. Washington Post. How the Jobwhose editorial staff suffers from some kind of priestly complex, tolerating an executive accused of destroying some 26 million emails in the UK’s phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch-owned British newspapers, and worse (if your job is to gain the trust of the editorial staff), handed over a cache of tabloid journalists’ emails to the Met Police, in a massive betrayal of all their sources? The move made him such a hated figure among journalists that, for a time, it was considered too dangerous for Lewis to enter Murdoch’s London headquarters. Yet Lewis apparently convinced Bezos that all of this was no barrier to his hiring. It was “an old story”. (Yeah, like that old Epstein story.) Sure enough, in May 2024, Lewis ran into the Job editorial team when he tried to cancel its coverage of her appearance in new developments in the phone hacking scandal and he never regained her trust.
Lewis’ red carpet appearance at a Super Bowl pre-party the same week as the bloodshed at Job stunned even Job editor Matt Murray, who thought he was in his office upstairs. But junket chatter has always been Lewis’s modus operandi. Roaming Davos and Cannes Lions, he treated newsroom reporters like Pulitzer peons, preparing costumes for the CEO’s boasts and toasts. His jargon-laden PowerPoint presentations were a sham. An all-inclusive meeting featured a confusing bow-tie graphic purporting to show how the new and improved system Job planned to create subscriptions. “To this day I don’t understand,” star Job sports columnist Sally Jenkins (now on the run to The Atlantic) told me. “Some people were like, ‘Is that a bowtie? Is that a funnel? What is that?’… It was always meetings, meetings, meetings, discussions, discussions, discussions, graphs, graphs, graphs, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Why did Bezos let Lewis fail and struggle for so long? We can’t imagine him tolerating such incompetence within the ruthless machine that is Amazon, where his handover to CEO Andy Jassy in 2021 went so perfectly. The answer can only be that at that time Bezos didn’t care much.
Throughout Trump’s first term, Bezos has been a strong advocate of Job values, the challenger when the newspaper’s harsh coverage of Trump led to the loss of a $10 billion defense contract to Microsoft. He sent his plane to Tehran to recover Job correspondent Jason Rezaian after 18 months of incarceration on trumped-up espionage charges. Bezos risked MBS’s wrath by speaking at a vigil for murdered Job columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In 2019, Bezos wrote: “My stewardship of the Postal Service and my support of its mission, which will remain unwavering, is something I will be most proud of when I am 90 and review my life.” »
However, he seems to have left the Job some time later, his libido was unleashed by his new pneumatic lover Lauren Sánchez. And this personal transition has coincided with an acceleration in his wealth that has seen his net worth rise from $28 billion in 2013 to $222 billion today. You would think that such a stratospheric fortune would make it easy to refuse to pay $75 million to manufacture and market a Roman tribute to Melania. Or not feel the need to curry favor with Trump by hastily ending the JobThe 36-year tradition of supporting presidential candidates came just 11 days before the 2024 elections, a move that caused the newspaper to instantly lose 250,000 hard-earned subscribers. Entertain War Sec Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, two days before the Job apocalypse, and saying nothing about Hegseth’s Pravda-like restrictions on Pentagon media coverage was not a good idea either. The point of f##k your money is to say f##k you, but it seems like the point of f##k you money is to have more f##k you money.
What’s disconcerting is that Bezos really was a tech visionary, and, in fact, many of that first generation or two of tech bros were. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page have forever transformed the way we harness the world’s wealth of information and learning. Elon Musk made electric cars that were eco-friendly, fast and beautiful, and promised us his rockets would take us to Mars. Even Travis Kalanick, the rapacious CEO and co-inventor of Uber, invented a way so that we would never be stranded. But as all the nerdy dreamers transformed into carefree plutocrats, it was like looking at a map of the Descent of Man: their muscles pumped up to comic book proportions, their aspirations magnified, they hid in their luxurious Blue Zone caves. I think most of them started out with a sincere belief that technology could make the world a better place, but they ended up just wanting to make their OWN place better.
The Jeff Bezos who bought the Job He was a different type from the one who allows its destruction today. But the oligarchs will become oligarchs. And if your motto is “Move fast and break things,” it turns out that a lot of what’s broken is what we value most.
