Bezos Buys Dog

You know you’ve got a problem when your glory days are 40 years in the past. The purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos has sponsored a legion of articles referencing Woodward and Bernstein, but nothing much since. There’s a reason for that: there hasn’t been much since. Washington Post has been in the doldrums for nearly half a century. It was inevitable that something had to give. Yesterday it did.

In public statements Bezos says that he doesn’t have a master plan for changing the paper, but that is pretty difficult to believe. Last year in an interview he predicted that newspapers would never appear in print 20 years from now. I find that hard to believe as well. I think the future of print newspapers looks a lot like the present does in Japan today: the product that appears in print is for the elites and they pay top dollar for it. Don’t be surprised if newspapers start to sell for $10 or $15 a copy in 10 or 15 years. There won’t be much advertising. Individual subscribers will pay.

If I were the new owner of any newspaper, I would accept a simple truism that media barons from Tina Brown to Michael Bloomberg to Katherine Graham never seemed to: the Internet is for breaking news. Print is for analysis. Analysis comes in long form. Give me 10,000 words about what yesterday’s news means and why I should care, and please put it in print because it’s easier on the eyes than it is on the tablet.

When publishers start to understand that, and the fact that bland doesn’t sell and that edgy does, that mainstreaming is boring and alternative is mainstream, they will start to turn a profit.

8 Comments.

  • I completely agree. Since TV, breaking news has not been the purview of paper newspapers, their only essential function is to explain the news.

    Of course, as presses became faster, the optimal economy of scale changed and most large cities went from dozens of newspapers to two to one, and recently, many have dropped to none. As remote, electronic presses became available, the national newspapers could outcompete local newspapers, arriving as quickly as the local city paper, and even having local news (the New York Times has a Texas edition that’s distributed in Dallas and Houston and competes with the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle). So competition has become increasingly fierce, with fewer and fewer survivors among the print media.

    But, as an elderly person, I still prefer to read analyses on paper, just as Mr Rall says he does (but I check the on-line New York Times and Manchester Guardian for breaking news).

    The entire US MSM is dedicated to the proposition that America is the Greatest Force for Good that the world has ever seen. A few New York Times editorials have questioned the drone strikes, while pointing out that Bush, Jr and Obama have only killed evil people, but the editorial writers had qualms that the precedent might allow some far distant future successor to actually kill innocents. Nah, not possible. The US institutions guarantee that our President can never do evil, only good. As Nixon said, if the US President does it, then it’s legal and it’s For Good and Against Evil, and the US MSM uniformly agrees.

    Mr Rall used to post links to the English-language Russian press, which continues to provide a very different perspective, but I haven’t seen any recent references. My satellite provider has the channel, Russia Today, and it mostly details American War Crimes.

    So the direction is for print media to continue to contract, until there are only a handful of survivors. And not a whole lot of truth among the lot of them.

    • Hi Michael, I do continue to post my interviews on Russia Today television and other foreign sources, and if you ever miss them, you can always check the media link on the toolbar of this very same website. I try to keep my archives of media appearances fairly complete.

  • alex_the_tired
    August 6, 2013 7:11 AM

    Ted,

    1. Absolutely, the Post’s glory days are gone. But it isn’t just the Post. Pick a “big story” the media’s done in the past 10 years. You can’t. Even if you throw in 9/11, the reality is this: The New York Times had 9/11 happen not five miles from their main office. They have HUNDREDS of staff. There is, literally, not one possible way they could NOT have covered 9/11 well. But everyone acts like they turned water into wine. Wrong. They did their jobs. And when THAT gets rounds of sustained applause, you know there’s a problem.

    2. Expanding on 1. What’s more noticeable to me is the stories the papers are NOT covering. Police brutality. Where’s the New York Times scathing indictment in a series of long-form articles about police thuggery in New York? Where’s the outrage over not just Bradley Manning (writing articles is not the same as coverage) but over what his leaks revealed? The Occupy Wall Street pieces were usually only to poke fun at the freakshow. Where was the long-form analysis of the complaints? Where were the demands via coverage to force/embarrass politicians into action and reform? If you think a 30-year-old bottomfeeder named Tourre is the force of evil that brought down the U.S. economy, you’re nuts. Did I miss the pieces where the papers ran headlines about how this was all BS?

    What the newspaper shows me, more and more, is what it avoids covering. And that can be just as informative.

    3. I’ve read the Washington Post. Hold on to your hats, everyone. It sucks. The paper looks awful, it reads awful (perhaps I should coin the term “eye-feel”). It is a carbon copy of any of hundreds of middlin’-size papers all over the country, but because it’s in Washington D.C., it gets world-wide attention. But it’s really a crummy read.

    4. The media could have saved itself by doing one simple cluster of things: Make the online archives free, charge for the physical paper, don’t put anything online for a week (except emergency items like “Tornado Coming. Run for Your Lives!”), and offer a subscription-based “paper” that consists (as Ted mentions) of long-form analysis.

    Now, the sheeple are conditioned to demand their “right” to free information. Paying for a paper (and thus employing journalists) is for chumps. When you point out that the information comes as the end product of a lot of research and effort, you are given Lecture 26/j-24 from the hipsters: “You don’t understand. It’s like fire. If I light a stick from your fire, I’m not stealing your fire. Information wants to be free. You need to come up with a better business model.” And who leads that chorus? The people who already made their fortunes off the Internet and the youngsters who can survive without health coverage, without a 401(k) and who can sleep on a couch at a friend’s for free.

    Give it five more years, when these “I (heart) Wikipedia” people discover they need a root canal and are shocked, shocked I say, that their dentists won’t do it for free–and their millionaire bosses won’t pay for it either–they’ll start waking up (but it’ll be too late).

    5. Bezos bought the Post, I hope, for one purpose. He’s going to fire the deadwood and bring in some rabble rousers. And he’s going to tell them all the same thing: “I’m bulletproof. I’m richer than butter, I run a global company. I want you to start making the right people pay for what’s going on in the world. And I will cover you all the way to the gates of Hell.”

    But I suspect he bought it for much less-lofty goals.

    • As usual, Alex, correct.

      I’m always shocked at what a crummy paper the legendary Post is, from the terrible local DC non-coverage to the cut-and-paste Administration press releases they pass off as national news to the godawful political commentary by the boringest columnists anywhere – and that’s saying something.

      Go ahead, blame the Internet, but even if it didn’t exist you wouldn’t need the Post. It’s useless.

      As for breaking stories, seems to me that the people who do that are all rogue individuals like Assange, Manning and Snowden. The official state media “reporters” are too busy sucking White House dong for “access” to dig anything up.

  • I really find all your ideas on print and media and business fascinating. More fascinating still is that the newspaper and the television owners too don’t understand their strengths…Using live TV time to report on what’s trending on Twitter??? It is almost as if they are TRYING to drive away people by doing everything wrong from what they spend their time, money, and staff on. Trash TV is more stimulating than CNN.

    When I was a kid I wanted to be a politician or journalist. I never considered that once I grew up everyone would be assuming newspapers must die. I certainly didn’t think both those jobs would become so impossibly useless and unappealing. It did not occur to me that professionally trained reporters would consider regurgitating politicians’ talking points to be news…The administration really has the media in the best position possible…obsessed with OFFICIALDOM and maintaining its good graces.

  • I first heard about Russia Today on this site when Mr Rall did interviews for them. They have limited resources, so I found them of limited utility as a news source, though I did enjoy Mr Rall’s interviews.

    Times change. I grew up learning in school that the US had the freest press, the best source of truth. Everywhere else, the press must print what the government tells them to print.

    At university, I was told the BBC has a better world-wide reputation, but limited resources, so not much that was useful outside the UK.

    The US press mostly supported the Vietnam War, and I began to question the veracity of the US press. Then I went East.

    When I first arrived in the mysterious and inscrutable Orient, the airport had a warning, ‘It is prohibited to have anything negative about this, or any related government.’ So the newspaper always has, as headlines, ‘King meets Sultan for lunch. Important issues resolved with excellent resolution!’

    No need to know the issues, that’s the job of the King and the Sultan, so you don’t need to worry about them. A perfect paradigm of the foreign press I’d learned about in school!

    But then, being here, after 9/11/’01, I saw for myself that the US MSM was full of counterfactuals. So what to believe? My epistemology became in sync with Michael Feldman’s: ‘What do you know?’ ‘Not much.’

    Now the entire Western MSM agrees that, in Syria, al Assad is a terrible tyrant, and all the Syrian people want his removal, but, tyrant that he is, he’s killed more than 100,000 Syrians who just wanted freedom.

    The Guardian has articles that say this is all a lie, plus comments that 70% of all Syrians support Assad as the best of bad options. So what to believe?

    Russia Today has a completely different version of Syria and the Snowdens of Yesteryear. On Russia Today, the anti-government forces in Syria are all Al Qaeda, and killed more than 450 Kurdish women and children.

    The Western media says the Syrian government forces ambushed and killed more than 80 freedom fighters.

    The Syrians I know who call relatives in Syria daily say Russia Today has a much more accurate version of what’s really happening in Syria.

    So Russia Today has increased in importance as one of my news sources.

    Everything I’ve seen lately on Russia Today contradicts the Western MSM–UK, US, French (and Qatari). And, from eye-witnesses, is much closer to the TRVTH!

  • The analysis I’d like to read, Ted, would be one elucidating just why that particular dog – and I’m familiar with its canine ways from long experience, as I check the foreign coverage out most every day (as I do the similarly currish NYT) – was worth 250 million USD to Mr Bezos. Is this a tax write-off, or does something more sinister lurk behind the deal ?…

    Henri

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