Sources: Jeff Bezos appears to be standing by Publisher and CEO Will Lewis and has envisioned WaPo growing to reach 100M subscribers from its current 2.5M (New York Times)https://t.co/GqIXHOaiKzhttps://t.co/BPlWz6nwp1
— Mediagazer (@mediagazer) June 14, 2024
Starting back in the 1980s, when they published a weekly tabloid for out-of-town readers, the Washington Post has been my personal paper of record. So, while the NYTimes‘ ongoing journalistic degradation has been interesting, the current attempted Murdochisation of the Post has been personally alarming. I have to assume I’m not alone in this bias!
When billionaire publishers fight with their awards-winning reporters, many words will be expended. This is probably more of them than anyone really needs, but it’s still only a small portion of what I’ve seen this week…
There are 130M households in the United States.
Somewhere there’s a typo, or he’s gone batshit crazy. https://t.co/w99qh9Vp5O
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 14, 2024
The [ridiculous] number is in the NYTimes piece, for what little that’s worth:
… Mr. Bezos’ decisions to reshape The Post underscore the central role he is playing at the paper he bought for $250 million more than 10 years ago. Mr. Bezos spends more time on other projects, including his space company, Blue Origin, leaving the day-to-day operations and editorial strategy to the chief executive and top editors. But he is ultimately The Post’s most important figure.
He has picked The Post’s chief executives and set the agenda for its business, according to multiple people with knowledge of his interactions with people at the newspaper. He approves The Post’s budget and advises the newspaper on business matters through regular phone calls with the chief executive and occasional meetings with its leadership team.
According to people who have spoken to him, he has said that he believes The Post could reach 100 million paying subscribers, a feat that would catapult it far ahead of competitors. (The Post now has about 2.5 million paying subscribers.)…
Drew Magary, “The Washington Post is about to embrace the darkness”:
It’s easy to execute a news dump when you’re one of the scant few remaining places that bother to properly cover news at all. Such was the case earlier this week at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, when executive editor Sally Buzbee — who had replaced venerated former news chief Marty Baron — was unceremoniously forced out by Post leadership after just three years at the helm. The news that Buzbee was given the gate arrived via a companywide email late Sunday night, seemingly without much in the way of advance notice down the masthead: Many of Buzbee’s closest colleagues were caught off guard by the move, Vanity Fair reported, as were the rank and file.
By the time all of those groups had learned of the regime change, it was too late for them to do anything about it. And when Post reporters demanded answers, CEO Will Lewis gave them all of the wrong ones at an all-hands meeting the following morning:
“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”
After casually dumping on his employees’ work (conveniently eliding any external or managerial factors that surely played a much larger role in the paper’s decreased readership), Lewis then told them that the search for Buzbee’s successor was an “iterative, messy” one that he couldn’t describe in any further detail. All reporters there were allowed to know was that their CEO had settled on two men that, by sheer coincidence, happened to be his friends: Matt Murray (who will serve as interim editor) and Robert Winnett (who will assume the job permanently after the election). Not only are all three of these men as white as a block of Monterey Jack, they also happen to have deep roots in upscale conservative media. Lewis and Murray both did long stints with Rupert Murdoch, with Lewis running News Corp’s Dow Jones and Murray coming over from the Wall Street Journal. As for Winnett, he currently runs England’s Daily Telegraph, purveyor of such fine op-ed pieces as, “No one ever says it, but in many ways global warming will be a good thing.”…
Sources told SFGATE that Sally Buzbee wasn’t necessarily beloved by the people who worked for her at the Washington Post — this tends to happen when you’re taking over the gig from the hero of “Spotlight” — but her newsroom did award-winning work at a time when such work remains desperately needed by the citizenry. Within the past 20 years, nearly 3,000 American newspapers have died. As has nearly every alt-weekly. As have Vice, Gawker Media and Pitchfork. Whether or not you hated any of these individual outlets is beside the point. Collectively, they served as a bulwark against ignorance, corruption and the general f—kery that constantly threatens to overwhelm the United States entirely. That threat is maybe even greater now than it was before: A second Trump presidential term looms, and his plan should he reassume the Oval Office amounts to Nazism, But Clumsier.
The Washington Post, with its extremely metal slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” was one of the few remaining legacy pubs that consistently seemed both willing and able to serve as a check on an increasingly deranged political system. They cranked out thorough, damning work while avoiding either mass attrition or an overarching ideological shift pandering to the right wing of the country, whose appetite for outright bulls—t is never sated. Personally speaking, I rely on the Post’s front section every day for my world news, because it tends to avoid the grotesque squishiness of the New York Times, and because it usually seems to like the journalists in its employ rather than hold them in outright disdain. I don’t always like the Washington Post, but it’s the joint I distrust the least.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to say that…
The cleanest, best move: Replace Will Lewis as @washingtonpost CEO. But if Bezos won’t (it seems unlikely unless another shoe drops), I have 3 recommendations. Among them: Bring back a public editor or ombudsman. My new @GuardianUS column https://t.co/9VkHyImHI7
— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) June 12, 2024
… When Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, it was struggling financially, and its future was uncertain. The billionaire’s ownership not only restored the paper to profitability for several years, but allowed it to regain its prominence. While setting an ambitious tone for technical transformation, he properly kept his hands off the journalism, letting legendary editor Marty Baron do his job.
It worked. The Post made money, boosted digital subscriptions and nimbly took advantage of technology. Fast Company magazine, twice over the past decade, named the Post the most innovative company in media.
More importantly, the Post staff did essential journalism and hewed to standards of integrity. Despite the complaining one hears about how no one covered Donald Trump until it was too late, the Post did, with two of its top reporters even producing a book, Trump Revealed, well before the 2016 election…
But now, all of that is facing an existential threat. And Bezos is very much in charge of how that will play out. He has a decision to make every bit as consequential as his original purchase (for the bargain price of $250m).
This time, he needs to save the Post from his own mistake…
Short of firing Lewis and starting over with another search for a CEO – the cleanest, best move – what can Bezos do?
Several things. He should instruct Lewis to publicly commit to giving the newsroom true editorial independence, pledging not only to the staff but to the public that there is a clear line between the business side and the journalists, and that he won’t breach it again. He should reinstate the role of independent ombudsman or public editor – one that the Post maintained for many years but abandoned in 2013 – to provide transparency and accountability to readers. (I’m not interested in the job, but I do understand its value; I was the New York Times public editor before joining the Post as the media columnist.)
And, though he has not commented publicly, Bezos should do so now – making clear his personal and unwavering support for accountability-oriented journalism independent from the business side of the company…
David Folkenflik, at NPR, seems to have been a catalyst for breaking the bad news:
Some WashPost thoughts, based on conversations with six people with knowledge of events, overlaid with a touch of analysis.
Let’s even call it a 🧵
First: Will Lewis wanted to force out Sally Buzbee and bring a trusted pal to run the WaPo newsroom. He wanted to make his mark.
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) June 3, 2024
2/ Buzbee didn’t want to give up her job for an ill-defined position.
Though Lewis praised her as “an incredible leader and a supremely talented media executive who will be sorely missed,” Buzbee offered no comments in statement announcing her departure /con’t
3/ That left Lewis with a conundrum:
His pal, a Brit with no US experience, could not lead the WaPo newsroom during a heated presidential election cycle (not mention unprecendented legal troubles for a former and potentially future president).Enter Murray.
4/ Murray’s post-election portfolio, from the cheap seats and even some inside the Washington Post, looks like a hodge-podge.
The new platforms/revenue streams/verticals are surely important to Lewis’ pledge to move fast to fix and build a stronger paper, but they don’t cohere.5. Murray is well regarded from his stint at the WSJ – many Journal alums are saluting him tonight. He is seen as nimble rather than a radical innovator.
Fwiw, it has not gone unnoticed that all three Lewis newsrooms are headed by white males.
6. But Murray won’t be the long-term editor of the paper – despite his title as executive editor. Nor will he oversee the conventional newsroom’s chief. That will be Rob Winnett
As I noted earlier, Winnett was a key reporter on Lewis team breaking Parliamentary expenses scandal
7. A lingering question: Why Winnett, beyond the shared history with Lewis?
Another: Will they foreswear paying sources for scoops, as they did for the British MP expense database? or are they open to redefining US and WaPo journalistic standards against such payments?
8. Another observation: there is queasiness among some at WaPo that these moves represent Lewis’ drive to consolidate power after newsroom gave thorough coverage to troubling Qs facing him in U.K.
No evidence one way or the other on that – may be clarified by detailing timing.
Per Politico‘s Playbook, “Inside the culture clash upending the Washington Post”:
… A series of emerging revelations, stemming from his announcement Sunday that executive editor Sally Buzbee would be leaving, to replaced by two close Lewis associates, have left the Post newsroom “uniformly horrified,” in one reporter’s words.
More consequentially, they have revealed that the clash between Lewis’ rough-and-tumble sensibilities and the Post’s more high-minded culture is even more profound than previously suspected: He can’t seem to figure out where his Fleet Street smarts are necessary and refreshing, and where they are toxic and self-defeating…
Post reporters have responded to the allegations that Lewis breached the wall between the business and editorial sides of the paper with more aggressive reporting on him. “The only way to fix what he broke is to double down on transparency about the whole thing,” one Post reporter told Playbook…
Lewis then added to his woes by going after NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who reported yesterday that Lewis had offered to horse-trade him an interview if Folkenflik agreed not to publish an article about his alleged entanglement in the phone-hacking scandal.
Lewis, who works with a comms staff out of the U.K. rather than the Post’s in-house flacks, responded by unloading on Folkenflik, calling him “an activist, not a journalist.” He further claimed that he “had an off-the-record conversation with him before I joined you at The Post, and some six months later he has dusted it down, and made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.”
As a side note, Folkenflik noted in his story that the interview he sought about the Post’s restructuring went to Puck’s Dylan Byers. Asked if Lewis made any kind of offer similar to what Folkenflik described, Byers said, “Of course not. And I have never agreed to anything like that, and I never would.”…
Of course, Dylan Byers is universally known for his journalistic veneration of anybody in possession of big money — publishers pay him to stand in proximity to rich men and whisper reverently ‘So luxe!’ Byers did his prissy best to uphold the honor of money and its minions. Gotta love his italic placement:
… Last week, of course, Lewis very hastily and inelegantly pushed out executive editor Sally Buzbee—she resigned after refusing to accept what was effectively a demotion—and then came under significant fire, following an apparently Buzbee-placed Times story, for allegedly having tried to kill Post stories regarding his old role assisting Rupert Murdoch in the wake of the U.K. phone-hacking scandal. (Lewis denied having pressured Buzbee, and has denied any wrongdoing in the phone hacking affair). Another story, from NPR’s David Folkenflik, asserted that Lewis had offered him an exclusive interview if he dropped a story about the Murdoch saga. The Post newsroom, already anxious and quietly seething about his recent comments that he couldn’t “sugarcoat” the company’s deficiencies, quickly aligned against him. They had already circled the wagons on behalf of Buzbee, a mostly unremarkable editor who had been refashioned as a martyr.
Then Lewis went and made matters worse by being a little too characteristically frank with his feelings about the Post’s performance and the motives of his accusers. He could hardly conceal his resentment in his glib responses to Post reporters for a piece last Thursday. On Friday, recognizing that his Fleet Street candor had violated the etiquette and traditions of institutional Washington journalism, he apologized and committed himself to a listening tour—an attempted reset, or in Post corporate pablum, a chance to fix it.
In any event, Auletta seemed keen to turn the screws, perhaps in part because Buzbee is a fellow Livingston judge. In his opening speech, he called attention to a recent report in Alan Rusbridger’s Prospect highlighting the allegation that Lewis knew of, or was involved in, News Corp.’s decision to delete 30 million emails and discard nine boxes of potential evidence relating to the scandal. (In his prepared remarks, Auletta wrote that Murdoch did this to “cover his ass”; alas, that pithy locution didn’t make it into the actual speech). He then called attention to Lewis’s alleged pressure campaigns against Buzbee and Folkenflik, stating, “Lewis doesn’t get a pass.” (History rhymes, of course: More than a decade ago, Auletta’s New Yorker column had been the vehicle for Jill Abramson’s version of the events surrounding her own ouster from the Times under its then-new British C.E.O., Mark Thompson.)
The tone and tenor of Auletta’s critique conveyed the challenges now facing the Post’s publisher as he seeks to lead the paper out of its financial, editorial, and cultural morass. The man initially seen as the Post’s potential savior has now become its latest scapegoat—which, as I noted last week, may limit his ability to enact the strategic changes that are so obviously necessary…
After last week, however, Lewis must now pull this off with the handicap of adhering to decorum and appeasing the Livingston set—those who, in a fit of magical thinking, expect Jeff Bezos to either fire Lewis (he won’t, not for this anyway) or at least formalize the separation of church and state between front office and newsroom. Alas, the tragedy here is that church and state need to work more closely together to close the $77 million hole on the Post’s P&L. But that’s not conventional wisdom in such circles. This week, former Post media columnist and New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan called on Bezos to reinstate the role of the ombudsman—epitomizing the misalignment between journalists’ concerns and the existential business problems that actually bedevil the Post. This will not be the last such idea slipped into the public suggestion box, of course…
We’ll see if Lewis’s contrition is effective, but the whole penance tour raises a larger question. Inarguably, the challenges to existing business models call not for more decorum but for greater candor. Indeed, the urgency with which he had initially diagnosed the Post’s problems was actually his most refreshing characteristic. “People are not reading your stuff” may have offended some high priests in the newsroom, but it was also inarguably true. And perhaps the fact that it offended some people says more about the Post’s culture than it does about Lewis, himself…
If the Masters are not allowed to yell at their peons — especially the female ones — what, asks Dylan, is the point to doing journalism, after all?
I can’t parse what the “third newsroom” is but it sounds very 2015–SEO, social, pivot to video–just as AI threatens to be a new web. I am worried that serving “Americans who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed” is code for Post as Murdoch.
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) June 3, 2024
Josh Marshall, at TPM — “The WaPo Blow-Up And the Ongoing Riddle of Newspaper Decline”
… I don’t know enough about the situation at the Post to add more than you’re hearing from other commentary. There are a lot of things that look bad and I’m fairly confident they are bad. But I don’t know the backstory or details well enough to do more than repeat widely shared impressions. But I have a few ancillary observations.
The first is a simple pattern, not terribly surprising, but still worth absorbing. We’ve seen a series of billionaires get into the news business by purchasing for-profit news entities with what seems like the implicit promise that their vast resources will allow them to focus on journalistic excellence even if that means running losses which the new owner can cover without much difficulty. This seemed like the Bezos concept. He bought the Post when it was seriously on the ropes and when its longtime family owners (the Graham family) simply didn’t have the resources to get the paper back to profitability or to secure its place as one of the 3-to-4 national U.S. newspapers…
… [T]he billionaire eventually gets tired of losing money. On one level, of course they do. That’s just donor fatigue. But not exactly. These aren’t truly charitable efforts. And the funder/owners have more than enough money to sustain the losses forever. But money-losing businesses just don’t sit right with them. It’s not in their DNA. It’s not surprising. These people come out of the world of business. They’re not third generation descendants of business founders…
Second, the Brits. British journalism is just a very sketchy world. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean this journalistically but also in terms of business, though I’m less versed in that part of it. And this is quite apart from the Murdoch domination of the British journalism world. When I was beginning my journalism career and did a lot more international and national security reporting, I realized very quickly and really to my surprise that even what I had understood to be prestige British dailies routinely crossed all sorts of ethical lines. Some of the big ones were pretty openly known as open for business to foreign intelligence services that wanted to place stories. (The Guardian here seems to be the exception among major British papers, and it’s ownership structure is different.) I’m not looking to pick fights here. I don’t apply this to all British journalists… An increasing number of major U.S. publications have recently come under executive leadership by Brits, often from the Murdoch world. That’s not a great development. That applies in spades to The Wall Street Journal, to CNN (though perhaps less damagingly) and now the Post. The recent shake-up has put the whole operation under the management of UK newspaper execs…
Final point. I’ve discussed a lot over the years the core dynamic behind the decline of the American journalism business. It’s not “the internet.” It’s that the Internet robbed American newspapers of their geographical monopolies of commercial speech in their zones of operation. Hard news and certainly political news were essentially loss-leaders funded by the funnies, the crossword, sports, the metro columnists and more. Take away those monopolies and everything falls apart.
The news publications that are now making the finances work at scale are those that can command sufficient time-attention apart from hard news and politics to be able to fund hard news and politics. Last month I saw this post at the gaming site Kotaku which noted that, in terms of time spent, the Times is now more a gaming company than a news company. I found that to be a truly amazing statistic. And it’s a testament to Times news executives in keeping the hoary crossword chunking, making a brilliant strategic investment in Wordle and then adding more similarly addictive things on top of that. Obviously, time spent isn’t the only or best metric. But it’s a pretty important one. If that’s what holding the most Times’ attention-minutes, that must be a huge, huge data point and certainly critical to sustaining lots of subscriptions.
This comes back to the big journalism killer: social media sites created a way of holding readers’ / users’ attention time without the need to create any news content at all. We still don’t have a good way of making news widely economically viable in that reality.
trollhattan
Hundred-million subscriptions. What, does he want WaPo to become Parade Magazine?
swiftfox
I cancelled my subscription. Still “read” Slate but only three times a month lest I run out of free articles. So I limit myself to Fred Kaplan. Their Supreme Court coverage is good but it’s too many articles. Always figured when the Post took over in 2008 or so it would decline. They used to have great writers but most of their headline or “recent” articles are advice or sleaze ball.
Ruviana
I dumped the Post earlier this year after stories about a “conservative shift” began popping up. New columnists appeared and all of them seemed to be right-wing. With everything I’m reading now I think I made the right choice.
laura
The enshitification of everything continues apace as Bezos greenlighted the veal sausage fest of british bro’s fixing to erase journalism in favor of gossip and news-like stuff. How long until the Washington Post includes a daily pair of tits on page 3? Kay Graham must be spinning in her grave.
Baud
He could get to 100 million if he includes it in Amazon Prime.
A Ghost to Most
I subscribed to the dead tree version of WaPo for 26 years, then digital for another decade. I quit in disgust over the WaPo Wingnut Welfare columnists. FTFNYT, and FTFWaPo.
Anoniminous
Yeah, it’s a real riddle why people have stopped reading newspapers.
O. Felix Culpa
AL, you are not alone. I’m still hanging on to my WaPo subscription, with trepidation. Much more Murdochization and I’m out.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: That, or they’re counting on foreign subscribers. And they could make that work if they decided to cover DC and the region, and the federal government, with expertise like The Economist or the Financial Times or similar things. It’s not impossible.
They could do a lot of things better, and make people want to buy the paper for actual news. But they don’t seem to have much interest in that. (I dropped home delivery of the WaPo back in the W days and have never had a digital subscription with them.) Their coverage of NoVA politics and elections is almost non-existent or is totally conventional. Fuzzy Vest good cause not TCFFG and cause people like him (even though they know little or nothing about the bad things he’s doing because the WaPo doesn’t cover that stuff…)!!
Newspapers is a tough business. Bezos could make it an important player in actually informing people, but turning it into yet another Murdoch rag probably isn’t the way to do it.
Dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Anoniminous: That is comically bad. Just awful. The headlines are making people less-informed.
Grr…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
hrprogressive
Journalism is owned by corprofascist shareholders who demand fealty to their profits more than anything, and that means putting a thumb on the scale for the Fascist GOP who can’t wait to give them the keys to the kingdom, so long as they toe the Dear Leader Line, and they will, because they don’t care.
Unless/until someone gets any form of Journalism off the ground that isn’t beholden to these interests (and let’s be honest, it’s probably too late for that), then we’re not going to get “news” any longer.
We get what they want you to be told, and what we’ll be told is that They Are Amazing.
Orwell couldn’t have imagined just how gleefully people would just accept this as being okay.
O. Felix Culpa
As I review my WaPo reading, it’s mostly Jen Rubin, Alexandra Petri, and occasionally Catherine Rampell. I would like them to stay employed, however, I’m not sure that the cost of the subscription and my soul are worth it, long term.
Another Scott
@hrprogressive:
It’s not hopeless, but people have to want to look for it.
E.g. StatesNewsroom.com
(The Virginia Mercury is one of their “papers”.)
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
Also, of course, amplifying many of the most offensive anti-woman tropes (and, by extension, all kinds of hurtful stereotypes).
Anoniminous
We used to subscribe to the local rag. Then it was bought and “financially re-engineered to maximize shareholder value” a couple of three times. We no longer subscribe.
O. Felix Culpa
Semi-related, breaking news from WaPo: Amazon-owned One Medical shifted some care to a call center, leader to patient safety issues.
Quelle surprise, said exactly no one.
Geo Wilcox
They’re going to go from 2.5 million to zero if they keep this shit up.
E.
If Marshall’s final point is true, it predicts some real horror ahead. We seem to prefer being alone with a shiny object to knowing about our world. It’s terrifying.
Baud
I should start a newspaper.
TBone
@hrprogressive: 👍
TBone
@Baud: I’d subscribe.
trollhattan
Heh, Dems are frolicking in Milwaukee. So unfair.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/06/15/good-news-9/
Tony Jay
Any billionaire who doesn’t plough their fortune into becoming an obsessive crime-fighting vigilante with cool toys and a leather-fetish is a failure of concept.
That is all.
trollhattan
@Baud:
Checked, and nobody currently claims Pantsless-Picayune.
TBone
This is off topic but important
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/06/15/vice-president-kamala-harris-announces-over-1-5-billion-to-bolster-ukraines-energy-sector-address-humanitarian-needs-and-strengthen-civilian-security/
TBone
@trollhattan: 😆 I’ve been to Picayune and love their newspaper history.
trollhattan
@Tony Jay:
“Alfred, I need a bitchin’ crime-fighting suit.”
“Sir, you need to as you Yanks say, ‘hit the gym’ first I should think.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So, Bezos is just another over hyped mediocrity that is to dumb to figure out there is no way in a hell a legacy business is going to grow 500%
O. Felix Culpa
@Geo Wilcox: Ding! Ding! Ding!
To me, it’s astonishing that these MOTUs have no idea who their subscribers are and what they want. People who still have a subscription to WaPo mostly want reputable journalism and investigative reporting, along the line of what Marty Baron provided. Several BJ commenters have already dropped their subscriptions; others (like me) are barely hanging on. From what demographic are they going to get new subscribers, if they continue Murdochizing? [Narrator: from nowhere.] The self-inflicted bleeding will be massive
ETA: The FNYT has cornered the recipes and games market. WaPo’s offerings in those areas are not competitive.
trollhattan
@TBone: Is there a better name? I think not! (And we have “The Bee”)
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: 5000% if I’m doing my math right.
TBone
@Tony Jay: 😍
TBone
@trollhattan: 💙😆
jackmac
The newspaper habit is hard for me to break. I have digital subscriptions to the Post, the L.A. TImes and the New York Times (and pick up the NYT’s dead tree print edition on Sundays) because there is still some quality and must-read material.( Plus access to mocking the Post’s roster pf right-wing lunatic columnists remains great sport.). My spouse also likes the U.K’s Independent and I drop in on the Guardian every so often.
But other sources have vanished or are sadly diminished. My hometown Chicago Tribune has been so degraded by its vulture capital owners that I stopped Sunday home delivery a few years ago and recently let a digital subscription lapse. The Tribune had been part of my life since reading the Sunday comics decades ago as a child and later via a 22-year association as a freelance writer contributing news, sports and feature articles.
MattF
I’ve subscribed to Apple News+. $13/month. I’m currently following around fifty titles. Yeah, I know, it’s Apple, yadda yadda. You get WaPo and a large eclectic collection of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Not NYT, though…
Parfigliano
@Geo Wilcox: Not going to zero fast enough.
Anoniminous
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Bezo basically recapitulated the mail order business by putting a book catalog online rather then shipping dead trees all over the place. He lucked out by Sears dropping their mail order business the previous year so he scooped that up as well. It still took 7 years for Amazon to turn a profit but then it really started coining it.
Moral: it is good to be smart, it is better to be lucky
O. Felix Culpa
@jackmac: The Trib’s demise at the hand of the vulture capitalists is so sad. It used to be a must-read for me too. I have journalist friends who made their careers there, back when it was a genuinely good newspaper, and they’re horrified at what’s happened. It’s barely worth bird-cage lining anymore.
Tony Jay
@trollhattan:
“Has Sir considered constructing a self-propelled personal battle-suit? Or perhaps Sir could acknowledge his physical limitations and take more of a supervisory role as the guiding intelligence behind a trio of female crime-fighting specialists?”
“Where’s the fun in that? I wanna punch bad guys.”
Icily “Then perhaps Sir should simply work his way through his contact list and enjoy a target rich environment.”
Kristine
@MattF: I sub’d to Apple News last year. Which means that even though I cancelled my WaPo sub last week, I can still read them (and I’m still supporting them, albeit to a much lesser extent).
I’ll do it for Petri, I guess.
I balked at subscribing to Apple News for years because I felt they’d function as a filter, but so far they seem to offer pubs with a range of views.
trollhattan
@Tony Jay:
Heh.
“Okay fine Alfred, have it your way. Crime-fighting is out, I shall instead become a Master of pickleball. Alfred, fetch me my racquet and balls!”
“Your…balls, sir?”
Keith P.
Pie-in-the-sky predictions are becoming the norm. Just this week, Elon Musk claimed his Optimus toy will end up in every household (at $20k each) and be a $100 *trillion* business. (FWIW, Honda had a bipedal walker over ten years ago)
kindness
I’m keeping my digital WaPo subscription for now. Making no promises though.
sab
@Another Scott: Wow. What a find. Thank you.
brantl
Sweet Jesus, please take me before they make this world any dumber, with these clowns.
Marmot
We canceled our WaPo subscription after a particularly hand-wringing editorial by David Ignatius begging Biden to drop out of the race.
The liberal columnists don’t understand the advantages of incumbency, and just adopt whatever fears the right injects into their minds. I’m not paying for that.
MattF
The PressReader app is another source of newspaper/magazine content. You subscribe to it through your local public library.
Baud
@Marmot:
Yep. Instead of being a leading voice, they’re following the agenda of the right.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I read WaPo for the centerfolds
Ruckus
I will ask.
Today, what is a newspaper useful for?
Status? How and No.
Information? What is in a newspaper that is not online?
Start the fire in the fireplace?
Don’t have one.
History, memories of when they were important?
My first job was delivering the small city newspaper for a few blocks around my home. And that was over 60 yrs ago. Things have changed just slightly. The concept of a lot of newspapers closing is good for the forests. Especially with 6 or 7 day a week papers.
Newspapers were very necessary more than 50-70 yrs ago, maybe 60-70 yrs.
I’d ask the question, how many homes take a newspaper any longer? I’d bet the % has gone down a large bit over the last half a century. Electricity is here to stay. Newspapers have been replaced, things move on as the years go by. It is the nature of having more than the minimum amount of innovation and progress. Sure not everything changes but much does. As someone born in the first half of the last century (OK barely in the first half…but still, a while ago) the changes have been significant in many ways, and less so in others. But burying one’s head in the sand so that one doesn’t see or hear anything new really isn’t a reasonable way to live.
espierce
@O. Felix Culpa:
This! ☝🏻
Cancelled my annual subscription on Wednesday and by Thursday they were offering a hugely discounted rate if I’d re-subscribe.
Time will tell and I’m not optimistic.
Tony Jay
@trollhattan:
“If Sir is entirely sine inspiratio then, if I may be so bold, perhaps the time has come for a reinvention of the traditional billionaire pursuits of charitable endowment and anonymously supporting good causes.”
“……..”
“Yes, Sir. Your Balls, Sir. At once, Sir.”
Baud
@Ruckus:
A lot of news content still starts from newspaper reporters.
Sid
Too bad MacKenzie Scott didn’t get the WP in the divorce.
TBone
@MattF: 👍 great resource!!!
E.
@jackmac: My grandfather worked his entire life at the Chicago Tribune. Started hawking papers, retired as a managing editor. No education, first gen immigrant. Mike Rothko wrote a nice piece about him when he died. He’s rolling pretty hard in that grave.
lowtechcyclist
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
My blood runs cold.
lowtechcyclist
@E.: I think you meant Royko.
trollhattan
@Ruckus: @Baud:
Right, it’s not the print-on-paper medium it’s the knowledgeable news-gathering organization that has been shredded in much of the country, and is not being backfilled. My kid’s generation knows little or nothing of that now, how it (to varying degrees) delivered truth to power and informed what was really happening, as opposed to what locals were being told.
Television and radio once had coequal roles and corporate takeover of those media turned them into propoganda mills.
What’s left?
TBone
@Another Scott: thanks for the states news link! I’m sending this to my cousin in Michigan (much ado about nothing lawsuit)
Hip check. Female Secty. of State. Ha ha ha 🙄
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/michigan-judge-rejects-bensons-guidance-absentee-ballot-signatures
eclare
I canceled my subscription a few weeks ago and started a trial with the LA Times. I admit I miss the political coverage, but I have a feeling that coverage will change a lot in the months ahead.
Also, for some reason, the LA Times has significantly more typos.
Marmot
@Baud: Yeah. It may have made sense at some point to ask question Dems about topics their Repub opponents are pushing, but definitely not when they lie demonstrably and often. Instead you should assume they’re lying until proven otherwise.
But you know, I can’t actually think of a time when you could give Repubs the benefit of the doubt.
Marmot
@eclare: How are you liking the LA Times apart from those things? It’s on my list of possible replacements, though I should really just support Talking Points Memo.
trollhattan
O/T CAISO, most of California’s electricity grid, reported for a time today our renewables generation exceeded consumption. We were net exporting solar and wind out of state. A bit boggled by that.
TBone
@Sid: seconded
TBone
@trollhattan: excellent news
eclare
@Sid:
So true.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: Bruce (from Finding Nemo): Good on ya, mate!
eclare
@Marmot:
I like it pretty well, but it’s definitely different from the WaPo. It has a lot of entertainment industry news, which is to be expected in LA. Luckily, I like entertainment news (I’ve read People for decades), but if that isn’t your thing, you may not like the paper.
But it’s low risk, I got a four month trial for $1.
gene108
@Baud:
British editor correcting your use of the English language.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@eclare: I think most papers cover their home town industry the best. The Detroit papers cover the auto industry, for example. Politics is DC’s home town industry
O. Felix Culpa
@trollhattan: Not a lot. ProPublica and TPM? “The internet” doesn’t do reporting. It just gathers what reporters (and disinformation sites) put out there.
Matt McIrvin
People actually quite often say that global warming could be a good thing. It’s just that those people are all shitheads and ignoramuses.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: It’s important for someone to actually be doing journalism. Most of us may be reading that journalism through Google or whatever, but it has to come from somewhere. We just had a whole discussion about how AI isn’t magic.
It’s a tragedy that local newspapers have rotted as much as they have; that’s important information that there’s no good conduit for. If newspapers won’t do it, who will?
Peke Daddy
@Tony Jay: Yeah, but…
https://images.app.goo.gl/2ewtrpYMmefkz3YH9
jonas
World history tends to be written in broad brushstrokes, particularly when it comes to disasters and catastrophic inflection points. Rupert Murdoch’s domination of global Anglophone media in the latter part of the 20th and first part of the 21st century will certainly be up there with one of the sources of this particular civilization’s future collapse, though little talked about now (outside rarified political junkie circles). Kind of like how medieval people never quite picked up on the rat-flea-plague connection until it was too late. That’s Murdoch. He’s a fucking flea swimming with disease who has injected his pathogen (fact-free, rightwing shit-shoveling masquerading as “information”) into most of the blithely unaware media-consuming public.
Who are the rats? Republicans and Tories, of course.
CaseyL
@Marmot:
I cancelled mine after the news that WaPo was laying off reporters and replacing them with AI. I sent an email saying that hiring an ex-Murdoch exec was bad enough, going all in on AI was even worse, and I saw no reason to keep paying for toxic, inaccurate, crap “news.”
Melancholy Jaques
@Ruviana:
Same here. I dropped WaPo and subscribed to the Los Angeles Times on the recommendation of someone on this forum. Sorry that I don’t remember who. I haven’t been on there long enough to have an opinion.
But I do believe the entire political media has been either pro-Trump or anti-Biden. The comparatively tiny audience for MSNBC shows does not provide any real counterweight to FTFNYT, WaPo, & WSJ all anti-Biden, and FOX, CNN, and nearly 200 Sinclair local news stations, all pro-Trump.
We can do this, I have no doubt. Although the media love him, Trump is not more popular than he was four years ago. But it is going to require a lot of work in the swing states to identify our voters, make sure they can vote, and make sure they do vote.
jonas
@eclare: Reporting on the entertainment industry is not quite the same as People-style celebrity gossip reporting stuff. I think the LA Times recently has done some really good reporting on how the aftermath of the strike and all the turmoil studios are going through over streaming revenue and growth has been affecting the behind-the-scenes workers — camera operators, caterers, screenwriters, etc. It’s been a bumpy road. Hollywood is in for a major shakeout that will either end in one or two megastudios controlling everything and just switching all creative work over to AI, or maybe a new Golden Age where we finally move away from the “nothing gets greenlighted that isn’t a comic-book franchise or bankable IP” and we start making some interesting movies again. That aren’t 90% filmed in front of green screens. For, like, grown-up audiences.
eclare
@jonas:
Yes, the reporting is different, but I find the industry news interesting as well. I didn’t realize what a huge impact on employment the strikes had until I read those articles in the LA Times.
And of course the studios are going through huge shake-ups with streaming.
jonas
@O. Felix Culpa: So after completely ruining Whole Foods, Amazon asks “Hey, let’s see if we can fuck up a health care company, too?” Quelle surprise, indeed.
Baud
Via Reddit
Melancholy Jaques
@jonas:
American Fiction
Baud
Via Reddit, I see Steve Benan is still going yeoman’s work
trollhattan
@Baud: Hey, I began spouting gibberish since the day I learned to talk. Why change now?
Very cool, honestly. On-board computer made of seashells and leather straps, and we can still communicate with the thing outside the solar system. Nerd power.
lollipopguild
@Matt McIrvin: Many of these people are the type who see any and all disasters as a chance to make money off of peoples suffering. If we were headed to a global freeze they would be saying the same stuff.
zhena gogolia
@Melancholy Jaques: Yes, I enjoyed that.
Steve in the ATL
@Tony Jay: ¡en fuego! Like most of the USA, including the ATL.
Steve in the ATL
@Marmot:
Like Alex Berenson, writes great spy novels and godawful newspaper columns.
ETA: I’ll bet they both wear shorts with spread collars! #callback
frosty
@jackmac: The Tribune degraded my Baltimore Sun so much after they bought it that I dropped the subscription after reading for more than 25 years. Including subscribing in the DC suburbs and Pennsylvania! Bastards!
glc
@Geo Wilcox: Might even be a tax advantage in that, you never know. It works with race horses.
Steve in the ATL
@trollhattan: sell it to Texas at inflated prices! #revenge
Villago Delenda Est
Murdoch scum will remain Murdoch scum. Not content with killing journalism in Australia and the UK, Murdoch and his minions like Lewis are deadset on destroying it, along with the equally scummy assholes of Gannett, in this country.
Tony G
I’m going to vote for “Jeff Bezos being batshit crazy”. In my opinion … the life of a billionaire (or, in his case, multi-multi-billionaire) tends to cut a person off from the real world. People like Bezos (or Musk, or whoever) have spent their youths obsessively pursuing money, and then they get more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. After that, they live in a bubble — private jets, limousines, private compounds, etc. — with no contact with ordinary people. The people that they do see are paid sycophants who kiss their asses all day while telling them how great they are. As a result, their view of the world is totally distorted. So … we are owned and governed by people who are insane.
zhena gogolia
@Tony G: Sounds about right.
Baud
@Tony G:
I’d like to think if I had all that money, I’d also love the high life but spend a small fraction of it promoting liberal views and electing Dems. But maybe it would change me and make me like them.
Only one way to find out.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tony Jay: Tony Stark is ROTFLHAO at all this. “Wayne is such a damn chump!”
zhena gogolia
Wow, enjoy Isto, “That’s Life.” He makes me love songs I always hated.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tony G: Elno has recently gone and pissed off Luke Skywalker. This will not end well for Elno.
Sure Lurkalot
Gave up on WaPo at the beginning of the year. After Marty Baron left, things really went south and I hung on for who knows why. I quit the FTFNYT in 2019.
I did sign up for an LA Times trial to replace WaPo but I canceled it…beyond Michael Hiltzik, I didn’t find a voice for me there.
I can read articles in all three papers via my library subscription and/or on archive.is.
Not seeing the front pages of WaPo and the NYT every morning as I used to is a real soother.
gwangung
@Tony G: Well, the same for power (see the Supreme Court). Wealth and power will totally skew your perceptions if you don’t work at it…and most people are lazy in that way.
Tony Jay
@Peke Daddy:
“Would Sir perhaps care to celebrate his expertly conducted conquest over the Age of Mammals with a ticker-tape parade through the corpse-strewn streets of fallen New York? Roast marshmallows over an enormous bonfire stacked three stories high with the bodies of those foolish enough to consider themselves his rivals?”
“………….”
“Shall I bring in the dinosaurs?”
“Dinosaurs!!”
“At once, Sir.”
BlueGuitarist
@Another Scott:
Dan Pfeiffer recommends Courier Newsroom:
https://couriernewsroom.com/
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Steve in the ATL: Like ARod?
Marmot
@jonas:
You don’t know the future.
jackmac
@frosty: Ah, The Baltimore Sun. I had regular work with the Sun when various Baltimore area college and pro teams came to Chicago. My editors were awesome and I was proud to be associated with it — even in my limited way. The collapse of the Sun — first with Alden vultures and now with that sleazy Sinclair owner — is disgraceful. I hope the upstart Baltimore Banner gives the Sun a run.
Tony Jay
@Villago Delenda Est:
“Tights and a cowl, Bruce? Spending all your nights in alleyways looking to rough up guys in make-up? You’ve got issues, man.”
“Sorry, Tony, what was that? I was distracted by all the not getting blind drunk and losing my company to a bald billionaire with a bulky armor kink.”
Jackie
Why he thinks he won’t be outed 🤦🏼♀️ This, in Detroit today.
Between dissing Milwaukee, and today, TCFG is really doing a biggly job reaching out to black voters.
Poe Larity
I find it a little hypocritical since John fired the Ombudsman here and never replaced them.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
+1
Cheers,
Scott.
[eta:] – I see that Firefox still leaves weird extraneous extra lines (even on Ubuntu)…
zhena gogolia
@Poe Larity: matoko chan?
frosty
@jackmac: I’ve subscribed to the Banner. Lots of Baltimore and Maryland news but not much national and international like the old Sun. But good local coverage. Lots of reporters with Maryland ties who came back from elsewhere.
Citizen Alan
@Tony G: This is why JB Pritzker frightens me so much. I cannot conceive of a truly moral billionaire, so I can only wonder in fear at what evils he has concealed to become such a darling of the Left.
zhena gogolia
@Citizen Alan: Oh, man, you are a pessimist!
E.
@lowtechcyclist: heh. Or Mark Rothko would be cool too.
O. Felix Culpa
@Citizen Alan: There are many more worthwhile things to be frightened of–if that’s your bag– than J.B. Pritzker.
eclare
@Another Scott:
I didn’t know Penzeys was in WI. Of course they would put up a billboard.
Jackie
@Another Scott: Good message.👍🏻
Jackie
@Citizen Alan: Good grief! There are many billionaires with morals and values. 🤷🏼♀️
geg6
@MattF:
Same. I just ignore the stoopid when I’m scrolling. The cost, especially one so small for so much, is well worth it.
Steve in the ATL
@Jackie: GOOD morals and values. Can’t be many. If any.
E.
@Jackie: I’d be interested to see your evidence for this.
Tony G
@Baud: Well, with that attitude you’ll never be rich! (Sorry to break the news.). The way that I see it, there are two types of extremely rich people: 1) Those who inherit the money (and are warped by a sense of extreme entitlement from early childhood) … or … 2) Those who “build their fortune themselves” (or at least believe that they do) — which means that they’ve spent the years of their youth obsessively pursuing money, with no regard for anything else. Either way … by the time they have all that money they’re just twisted people.
Tony G
@gwangung: Yes, that’s certainly true. But I view the Supremos, congressmen/women, presidents as being the sycophantic errand-boys/girls for the billionaires. As George Carlin famously said: It’s a big club, and we’re not in it!
Mai Naem mobile
@jackmac: i believe that was done by scumball Sam Zell who recently kicked the bucket. Garbage person(what can you do with only $20 billion nowadays?) didn’t already have enough money so had to go raid the Trib pension fund.
E.
If you have that much money you have a moral obligation to give more of it away. People are suffering everywhere for lack of money. And there is no way you came by that much money honorably. Not billions. No one “makes” billions of dollars. They steal it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
True, but one would expect part of the lucky’s luck, is not falling for painfully obvious dumb ideas.
Quaker in a Basement
@trollhattan: This tells me he expects to offer home internet service, perhaps at a huge discount to current rates. Amazon, WaPo, and Prime Video will combine with internet connectivity.
Villago Delenda Est
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: In Seattle, he’s been known as PayRod for two decades.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tony Jay: “Yeah, Bruce? We have the Hulk!”
wjca
It wouldn’t be a bad thing to make interesting (non-comic book) movies for kids, too. Maybe animated, but a step up from mere comic books. You know, with realistic characters and plots.