By Hamish McKenzie
Jeff Bezos seems to relish taking on almost impossible projects. After magicking up “the everything store,” which can now get a toothbrush from the internet to my house in six hours, he founded a rocket ship company, Blue Origin, with the hope of making spaceflight so cheap that humans can live in Earth’s orbit. But his most difficult task might just be trying to revive the Washington Post and restore it to a semblance of its former glory while also making it solvent. It’s also far less fun.
Yesterday, Bezos published a defense of why the newspaper he bought 11 years ago is not endorsing a presidential candidate this year. His case, whether you like it or not, was coherent: Americans trust “the media” less than they trust even Congress, and any news organization in this day and age that presents itself as impartial undermines its own credibility by appearing to take sides.
“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” he wrote. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased.”
As much merit as there might be to Bezos’s argument—and as understandable as it might be for his critics to decry a powerful and conflicted owner’s interference in an ostensibly independent editorial process—the root problem for the Post in its fight against irrelevance is less to do with a steely-eyed commitment to fairness and balance, and more to do with a business bind.
It just doesn’t make much sense for a news organization in the year 2024 to look like the Post looks, with thousands of editorial and sales staff, a product that often comes across as New York Times Lite, an income stream that blends premium subscriptions with crappy digital ads, and a political positioning that adopts the “voice from nowhere” but whose staff is quite clearly (and vocally, on social media) aligned with a particular party. It’s an institution that is out of place and out of time—a railroad company in the age of the automobile; a paper company in the age of the touchscreen.
The media ecosystem is in crisis because social media has a mental illness and traditional media has a physical illness. Today’s dominant social media platforms might make us angry and dumb, but they have functioning business models and, with the exception of X, financial stability. Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite problem. They produce quality work, but, with the exception of the New York Times and a few others, their increasingly decrepit bodies can no longer support their own weight. Even with an owner whose pockets are as deep as the Mariana Trench, the Post cannot escape that illness. When new publisher Will Lewis met with staff in May, he said the company had lost $77 million over the previous year and seen a 50% reduction in audience over four years.
So what’s a news industry to do?
Well, one path is to hope that stupendously wealthy individuals who believe that newspapers and magazines are still essential to a functioning democracy choose to prop them up—a path that Bezos, Marc Benioff (Time magazine), Patrick Soon-Shiong (the L.A. Times), and Laurene Powell Jobs (The Atlantic) are currently on. That can work for a few, and for a time. But at some point, assuming you are willing to put up with the prickly conflicts of interest, you run out of people who fit into the tight part of that Venn diagram, and even then, their willingness to absorb financial bleeding isn’t infinite.
Another path is to stop looking to the past for hope. When the fire has ripped through the forest, new trees can grow.
With the emergence of powerful new publishing platforms, growth through social networks, and a widespread acceptance that quality journalism can command quality subscription prices, we are witnessing the rise of a new generation that can build for the media future without the legacy baggage of old institutions.
Startup news organizations such as Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, The Bulwark, Defector, Puck, Punchbowl News, The Ankler., and The Dispatch are proving that, while existing news outlets continue to struggle, the conditions are more favorable than perhaps at any time in history to start a new media organization. The Free Press, which is now three years old, boasts 800,000 subscribers and is valued at $100 million. Hasan launched the video-focused Zeteo within weeks of leaving his role at MSNBC and passed 3,000 paid subscribers and $3 million in annual revenue in the first three months. Political news outlet Punchbowl News was on track to bring in $20 million by the end of its second year in business. All of these businesses are growing robustly. They’re car companies for the age of the automobile.
In his editorial, Bezos suggests that many people are abandoning traditional media in favor of “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions.” The concern is valid, and it’s also fair to challenge the rise of “citizen journalism,” which a certain platform owner seems to equate with “Internet Man who spends all day online mashing keys and proclaiming himself The Real Media Now.” But the new-generation publications listed above are serious operations, with editors, well-compensated reporters, strong, focused editorial remits, and high-quality production. And yet their future is bright. They have leaner business teams, less tech and administrative overhead, and effective business models that, assisted by available-to-all technologies, just work. The most forward-thinking of that list even share ownership with the writers, offering some of the spoils and spotlight to the people who contribute the most value to their businesses.
In their search to restore trust in the media, one hopes that Bezos and co. stop defaulting to the old and start looking to the new. They should back the bold entrepreneurs who have a vision for the future of media that transcends a bygone era and lays infrastructure that makes sense for the AI age. Bezos has reportedly spent billions of dollars on Blue Origin’s efforts to change what’s possible in space. That money hasn’t gone to refitting old Soviet rockets. What if he took the same approach to the industry that is supposed to serve as the bedrock for democracy?
