WaPo opinion move prompts many questions
Do I have a view on Jeff Bezos’s recalibration of the Washington Post opinion section? Of course. Does it comply with his edict on free markets and personal liberties? I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint him.
Well, a bit.
The journalist in me is never far from the surface and I spent the latter part of this week trying to come up with a counterintuitive hot take along the lines of “Why Jeff Bezos is right about WaPo’s opinion pages?”
For a start, it would talk about how it is his paper (free markets) and we are naive if we think that owners don’t shape the opinion pages of the titles they own (personal liberties).
Then I was musing about how the Post is clearly in trouble (free markets) – who can forget chief executive Will Lewis’s line to a staff meeting: “People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it any more.” And that maybe they needed to do something radical to kick start its revival.
And that if America is increasingly polarised (personal liberties, kinda), why not lean into that as a brand, and define yourself against the instinctive biases of your biggest rival, The New York Times? (I don’t buy the idea that Bezos is trying to compete with the WSJ – he’s not an idiot.)
But then I came back to journalism. What will the output of these pages look like? Sight unseen I can’t imagine they’ll scream “read me”.
Surely people are going to flock to pieces where you already know that the conclusion will be something along the lines of “the good thing about/the problem with xxxxxx is that it does/doesn’t support free markets/personal liberties (delete as applicable)”. Maybe I’m wrong. Either way, it’ll be fascinating to see how this content shapes up.
One other thing: it’s fine to piss off your newsroom every now and again. Goodness knows, I’ve done it myself. But to consistently align yourself against them, however much people aren’t reading their stuff, feels like a strategic error. Sure there are other journalists out there you can hire, but how quickly can you re-staff a newsroom, or function with a sulky rump, without experiencing an irreversible impact on your business (free markets)?