What's Really Needed at the Washington Post

The choice facing Jeff Bezos

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There was an enormous amount of attention paid a few weeks ago— at least before the Biden meltdown— to the challenges at the Washington Post, one of this nation’s greatest remaining newsrooms. But it seems to me that the larger point about the Post’s problems was lost amid a cascade of reports about bad personnel choices, dubious ethics and internecine struggle.

I think the big issue is that the Post’s owner has been given bad advice—or, at the least, has not been compelled by his advisers to face up to a hard choice.

Let’s start by giving Jeff Bezos, the owner, his due. He bought the Post from the Graham Family (and their public shareholders) at a time, 11 years ago, when the Post needed investment, and he invested. Beyond the $250 million purchase price, Bezos has laid out what is likely hundreds of millions more. He appears to have been an exemplary owner in not interfering in news reporting, even when some of it, about his principal company and his personal life, was surely unpleasant. He retained and supported Marty Baron, one of our generation’s finest editors, including through confrontations with a dangerous and angry president. That’s all to the good, and considerably so.

Not enough

But here’s the problem in a nutshell: The additional investments weren’t enough. Part of that stems from a poor choice of Fred Ryan as publisher for most of Bezos’s ownership to date, and some more can perhaps be attributed to suboptimal choices in top editorial ranks in recent years. The consequence was a significant failure to innovate, as Baron conceded in his memoir. A lot of the difficulty is the result of woes afflicting all similarly situated publishers: another major leg down in the steady collapse of advertising; substantial news avoidance in our current, dreary news environment; unwelcome changes in social media, now being exacerbated by the erosion of search.

Publishing the Post has not proven to be as much fun as astronauting. Photo: Blue Origin

Whatever happened before Will Lewis arrived as publisher last year, the result was a $77 million annual loss, and an unhappy owner. Fair enough. It can be fine to be Pepsi to someone else’s Coke, or Avis to their Hertz (with the New York Times being that someone in the case of the Post), if you’re making money. But if you’re losing scores of millions along the way while they are making hundreds of millions, it’s no fun at all.

Now we come to the part about bad advice. Bezos has never wanted to actively manage the Post himself, probably both because he is much too busy doing other things and because he lacks publishing experience of his own. No matter how the newsroom may feel, I don’t think that’s going to change.

Looking instead to others, Bezos has clearly been told, including by Lewis, that the $77 million annual loss can be eliminated, even while the Post catches up with the Times in readers, influence and dynamism, all without substantial new net investment. I just don’t think that’s true.

Two diverging roads

Yes, the losses can be cut, probably to zero, at least in the near term. But if that’s the objective, the Post will—all the rhetoric about three newsrooms notwithstanding—join the majority of American metro papers in charting a fitful and painful decline, albeit starting from a much higher altitude, and perhaps at a slower pace, given its still-considerable remaining assets in terms of brand, quality and talent.

Alternatively, I don’t think it’s too late for the Post to take yet another run at the Times, as it has done occasionally over the last half century, and possibly to prevail, or to reach an acceptable and profitable parity. But that approach, I believe, would require major new investment—likely acquisitions, such as the Times has undertaken with Wirecutter, The Athletic and Wordle; faster and more effective deployment of AI in ways not yet seen in news; a reversal of talent losses and a concerted effort to amass new talent; a much more nimble and systematic adaptation to the creator economy.

Those are the two paths before Bezos and the Post. It is a challenging choice. Bezos has the available capital (he’s spent a reported $5.5 billion on Blue Origin, his spaceflight company), but he would need to be convinced to deploy it, which means he would need to have confidence in those tasked with the spending, and in their plans for doing so.

If neither further investment nor managed decline is acceptable to Bezos, he could and should sell to someone willing to run the investment risk. Bloomberg and Axel Springer come to mind as possibilities.

Where we are now, I am afraid, is that Bezos has been told he doesn’t need to make this choice, that renaissance on the cheap is achievable. Perhaps that is so, but I, for one, am not convinced.