A New
Age For The Washington Post
(By
David Von Drehle, Time Magazine, August 05, 2013)
The iconic paper's
sale to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos cements the end of our monopoly media era
It’s hard to
startle the journalism business these days, given the scale and speed of
disruption of the media industry. But the Graham family selling The Washington Post to
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250
million is an exception. Few newspapers in the world are as closely identified
with a single family. The story of the
Grahams and The Post used to be told in giant pictures on the wall of the
newspaper lobby on L Street not far from the White House. One grainy photograph
documented the day in 1933 when the brilliant financier Eugene Meyer bought the
paper for a song at a bankruptcy
sale on the courthouse steps. Another (a favorite of all of us who worked
there) showed Meyer’s remarkable daughter, Katharine Graham, beaming as she
left another D.C. courthouse in the company of her favorite editor, Benjamin C.
Bradlee, after they prevailed over the government in the Pentagon Papers
lawsuit.
But the most
important photograph, according to Mrs. Graham’s son and successor Donald E.
Graham, was the one that showed Meyer in the company of Philip L. Graham, the
brilliant and tragic husband of Katharine and father of Don. They were smiling
like a pair of Lotto winners, which they were. The year was 1954, and after
years of effort and red ink, they had finally bought out their last remaining
rival for dominance of the morning newspaper market in Washington. As other
families would learn in other cities across the country- the Chandlers in Los
Angeles, the Coxes in Atlanta, the Knights in Miami, and so on- dominance of
the morning newspaper routes would become a decades-long license to print
money. Owning the morning meant that The
Post would thrive as afternoon newspapers fell to the competition of
television news. (The last afternoon paper in Washington, the excellent Washington
Star, winked out in 1981.) It meant that advertisers hoping to reach a
broad Washington audience had no choice but to pay The Post’s steadily
increasing rates. That day in 1954 was the key to everything The Post
later became, Don told me one day about ten years ago when we bumped into one
another in the lobby. Watergate, all the Pulitzer Prizes, the foreign
correspondents, the celebrity columnists—all of it was possible because the
patriarch and his son-in-law managed to lock up the morning.
And now the
family saga has come to an end precisely because the morning doesn’t mean money
anymore. People get their news when they want it, and they have an astonishing
selection of packages and purveyors. In a sense, the story of The Washington
Post has come full circle, with Bezos in the role of Eugene Meyer. Like
Meyer, the new buyer is fantastically wealthy from unrelated enterprises. Like
Meyer, he is buying a publication hard-hit by a severe economic crash, one
title among many in a ferociously competitive media marketplace. True, The Post
is a vastly better newspaper today than it was 80 years ago, thanks to Meyer
and his descendants. (His great-granddaughter Katharine Weymouth is the current
publisher.) But the path to reliable earnings growth is at least as hazy for
Bezos as it was for Meyer 80 years ago, and it stands to reason that Bezos,
like Meyer, has reasons other than the bottom line to want to own an influential voice
in the nation’s capital. He becomes the
most prominent in a growing line of back-to-the-future moguls, like George
Hearst and Jock Whitney and Raoul Fleischmann of yore, who used money they made
or inherited from non-media ventures to elbow their way into publishing. Over
the weekend, billionaire investor John Henry won a competition to buy The Boston
Globe from the New York Times Company for a fraction of what the Times
paid for it. Last year, Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes bought the New
Republic magazine, not long after the late stereo magnate Sidney Harman briefly
took over Newsweek from, yes, The Washington Post company. In
retrospect, that sale probably was a harbinger.
The end of
the Graham family stewardship of The Post doesn’t have to spell the end
of the paper’s greatness. Arguably, private ownership by a mogul like Bezos
offers a more promising future. He will be free to experiment and invest
more boldly than a publicly traded corporate parent can do. Though hawk-eyed
media critics will be reading every word of the paper for signs that coverage
is being skewed in favor of other Bezos enterprises, the paper will no longer
be under the soulless gaze of Wall Street analysts watching The Washington Post
Company’s corporate stock.
And Bezos
insists he will not meddle in The Post’s editorial workings for personal
gain. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote in a
letter to employees. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to
the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth
wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we
will own up to them quickly and completely.” He also said he would continue
to live in “the other Washington,” where his “day job” will be running Amazon
as an entirely separate company. But
this certainly writes the epilogue to the age of monopoly media. Great fortunes
were made. Great journalism was produced (not enough, in retrospect, and there
was plenty of dreck to go with it). But news was covered and stories were told
in the generations before newspapers became cash cows, and the same will be
true in the future. The fact that people who are able to buy anything still want
to buy into journalism is all the proof you need.
The Post’s Incoming Owner, Known For Demanding Management
Style At Amazon
(By Craig Timberg
and Jia Lynn Yang, Washington Post, 07 August 2013)
In the relentlessly efficient world of
Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon employees quickly learn when they have overtaxed the
attention of their chief executive. He quietly pulls out his smartphone and
starts replying to e-mails. In extreme cases, Bezos will walk out. This demanding style is as much a signature
of the Amazon.com founder as his famously long-term approach to developing new
products or services, say people who have worked with the man who this week
agreed to buy The Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos (pronounced
“BAY-zohs”) has developed a precise and inventive approach to management that
has powered Amazon to the top ranks of U.S. technology companies. He favors a nimble, loosely organized company
in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work
group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome.
And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases
for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will
most excite customers.
Annual
salaries at Amazon are modest by the standards of the technology industry, with
compensation weighted toward lucrative stock benefits designed to instill a
sense of ownership and long-term purpose among employees. The key is measurable
performance. His management team produces what some have called ruthless annual
evaluations; top performers get larger stock benefits while laggards sometimes
face pointed suggestions that they find new jobs. “One thing I learned is when you got a
meeting with him, you’d better be ready,” said Nadia Shouraboura, who until
recently worked on Amazon’s senior executive team reporting directly to Bezos.
“He will figure out something you haven’t thought of. . . . If you haven’t
thought through exactly how to delight our customer, that’s a bad thing.”
There is an
outwardly genial side to Bezos, 49, a father of four who has an outsize laugh
and appears to revel in the salesmanship of a product launch as he strides the
stage in jeans and a dress shirt. But inside is a drive for perfection,
manifested by an unwillingness to waste time or energy. The recruiting motto: “Work hard, have fun,
make history.” Or, as Bezos put it in his first letter to shareholders, in
1997, “It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, ‘You
can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of
three’).” Kal Raman, a former top Amazon
executive who is now chief operating officer for Groupon, recalled the
consuming sense of mission instilled by Bezos. “When you try to rewrite
history, it doesn't come without blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice. He doesn’t
hold you to any standard he doesn’t hold to himself.”
In
describing Bezos, the most common comparison is to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs,
who was single-minded in his devotion to every new product. But while Jobs, who
died in 2011, is often described as a design visionary, capable of discerning
what consumers one day will want, Bezos has focused on delivering whatever they
currently desire — as quickly as possible. Delays are not accidents or
misfortunes but “defects” to be eradicated, he has said. The result is a company that has become among
the world’s most powerful retailers, a leader in the burgeoning world of cloud
computing systems and a player in a range of other businesses — book
publishing, television production, electronics manufacturing. Bezos, who founded Amazon in his Seattle area
home in 1995, meanwhile has become one of the country’s wealthiest men, with an
estimated $25 billion in assets and plaudits from Time, Harvard Business
Review and legendary investor Warren Buffett, who has hailed Bezos as “the
ablest CEO in America,” according to Washington Post Co. chief executive Donald
E. Graham.
Bezos has no
patience for bureaucracy, and employees are encouraged to put a stop to
anything that smacks of jumping through hoops. A rule requiring that employees
who brought their dogs to work sign in the animals disappeared soon after
complaints. Bezos also disdains the
formality of job titles, encouraging employees to work outside the scope of
their titles if it helps the company. One
of the most coveted honors at Amazon is the “Just Do It” award, given to an
employee every couple of months who strays from his or her job title to do
something that will help Amazon. Bezos helps choose the employee himself and
then hands the award — an old Nike shoe — to the winner at a company-wide
event. Those who win the award proudly
hang the shoes in their cubicles; in the online directory, a small icon is
placed next to the names of those who win.
“It was not the title but rather who’s got the best idea,” said John
Rossman, who worked at Amazon from 2002 to 2005 as an executive and is now
managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm. “Who’s bringing
the solution to the table? That’s what was most important.”
What is not
clear, even to some of those who have worked for Bezos, is how his management
style translates into running a newspaper amid a historic decline in readership
and revenue that has afflicted the entire industry. Bezos has said little about his plans for The
Post since the sale was announced Monday, though in a letter
to employees he made clear his desire to accelerate the pace of innovation
at a company that for years has struggled amid the same digital transition that
made online companies such as Amazon rich. The company, which will have no
ownership stake in The Post, declined to comment for this story. “The Internet is transforming almost every
element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable
revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear
little or no news-gathering costs,” Bezos wrote. “There is no map, and charting
a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need
to experiment.”
Bezos
encouraged a culture of experimentation at Amazon, where failure is accepted so
long as it yields new lessons. “Most
things at Amazon are viewed as an experiment,” said Jason Crawford, who worked
at Amazon as a development manager from 2004 to 2007. “And that means a few
things: You don’t assume it’s going to work before you try it, but that’s also
okay. The goal is try things. We’re going to measure them and find out if they
work.” Amazon was a pioneer of the now
common practice at tech companies such as Facebook
— testing different versions of the company’s Web site with different audiences
to see what works, Crawford said. Half the users might see a new feature, while
the others do not. Amazon employees would then measure the results to see if
the features encouraged people to buy more or stay longer on the site. Bezos has said that he intends to keep his
focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a
fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham
family, have been.
Bezos also
has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may
need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint
presentations. Bezos all but banned
such presentations
at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at
Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking.
Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are
no longer than six pages. The idea for
Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus
their thoughts and think them through. Bezos’s faith in the enduring power of
words is evident in his own annual letters to shareholders. His letter in 1997 is regarded as something of a founding
document for Amazon, highlighting his obsession over serving customers and
developing plans that take years to bring to fruition. That consistent long-term view- he often
talks of seven-year cycles for executing business plans- is the counterpoint to
his minute-by-minute quest to avoid wasting time. “Jeff has always been very efficient,” said
Jason Kilar, who worked at Amazon from 1997 to 2006, rising to the level of
senior vice president. “There is one very important thing he knows is not in
abundant supply on Earth, and that is minutes.”
But he added: “He has the patience to invest if he believes the strategy
is the right one.”
Why The Washington Post Isn’t A Charity Case For Jeff
Bezos
(By Lydia
DePillis, Washington Post 05 August 5, 2013)s on a Kindle.
If Don Graham were not such a
serious person, his announcement this afternoon that Jeff Bezos was purchasing
his family’s company might have seemed like a joke. The
Post seems so
very
old media for the phenomenally innovative tech entrepreneur. And
it’s true, Jeff Bezos has a very
whimsical
attitude when it comes to his personal stable of acquisitions–maybe he just
wanted a newspaper to even it out a bit.
But
Alan Mutter, who
knows the media business and the tech world better than most, thinks there are
many ways in which buying a legacy newspaper makes all the sense in the world
for the Seattle-based billionaire. Bezos hasn’t talked yet about his future
plans for the company, but from what we know, it’s fair to speculate a bit.
First of all, don’t be deceived by
the fact that Bezos is buying it himself, rather than Amazon–there’s little
reason to believe this is a passion project. It just would’ve been tricky to
make it a public takeover, because corporations don’t know how to value a
newspaper’s future earnings. And besides, though the markets have been
remarkably
patient with Amazon’s continued losses, a money pit like the
Post
would’ve been harder to stomach.
“If
Jeff Bezos had bought it with Amazon’s money, the shareholders would’ve killed
him,” Mutter says. “But if he owns it, he can use all the tools that are
available to Amazon. And if he does something with the
Washington Post
brand that advances the story for Kindle or Amazon Prime, they aren’t going to
mind.”
Another clue: $250 million, though
less
than what a lot of other things cost, is a lot of money for a company with
a lot of liabilities (the
Boston Globe, which serves a similarly-sized
region, sold for $70 million over the weekend).
“The Grahams are probably the last people in the world who’ll make money
selling a newspaper,” Mutter says. “He overpaid. And why would he overpay? He
sees the value in a brand that far surpasses what he’s looking at today.”
So how’s that going to happen? A few ideas.
1. The Post‘s
website–which it’s fair to expect will be overhauled–could be a major new sales
and advertising platform. “Newspaper publishing companies being agents
of commerce is a major new opportunity in Bezos world,” Mutter says. “He
invented e-commerce, you don’t think there’s going to be e-commerce on every
page of The Washington Post?”
2. It’s good to know things
about your customers. Especially your readers. Most media companies
watch where their readers come from, but Amazon has taken audience tracking and
predictive analytics to a whole different level in order to figure out what
they might want to buy. Integrating a news service,
just like a book discussion site, could provide even more data.
3. Content still matters,
and so does reputation. Amazon’s biggest foray into content so far
isn’t
Business Insider. It’s
Amazon
Publishing, which has put out hundreds of books under several imprints. The
problem is, it’s still hard to attract the best authors to an upstart internet
banner, when they can still gain the imprimatur of a Farrar Straus & Giroux
or a HarperCollins. “The early adopters of a straight-to-digital publishing
model are not going to the first-rate producers.
Hillary Clinton is not going to publish
her memoir with Amazon,” Mutter says. “There are all kinds of ways in
which content will find its way to the digital marketplace, but it’s going
to take a lot before the
creme de la creme goes digital first. And
frankly, that’s something that they have to work on.”
4. The future is video.
Amazon Instant
is a draw to the company’s Prime service, and
The Washington Post
could become a credible outlet for more original news content, which it’s
already started producing.
5. Amazon owns the modern
means of digital distribution. “He can just make The Washington
Post the default app on every Kindle,” Mutter says. That would give the
paper a visibility advantage few other news outlets can claim.
6. Amazon also owns the
modern means of physical distribution.
It’s tempting to think that because Bezos created an online juggernaut that has
eviscerated legacy industries, he would quickly dispatch with the Post‘s
print product. But Amazon is also probably the most efficient physical delivery
system the world has seen, and print advertisements still generate a lot of the
Post‘s revenue. He could put a print copy in every package, and have a
circulation of millions.
For all these reasons, the
Post
doesn’t need to generate revenue like it’s supposed to have done for its whole
life (and largely failed, propped up by a lucrative
education business). Instead, it can
complement and amplify other regions of Amazonia. “We’re in a post-profit era
for newspapers,” Mutter says, noting the not-entirely-economic reasons behind
recent rich guy purchases of the
Globe
and the
San
Diego Union-Tribune, not to mention the Koch brothers’
interest in the L.A. Times. We still don’t know what the
Post
means for Bezos. But it could very well be one piece of a much larger profit
puzzle.
Bezos Buys
The Post
(By Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, 08 August 2013)
The news
flattened me. I’m still not entirely vertical. We’re gonna need a bigger
spatula. My friend Ruth
Marcus said everything I want to say about this: There’s the rational
reaction, and then there’s the emotional reaction, and they’re entirely
different. Rationally, yes, I
understand, and support, and am prepared to applaud the decision by the Grahams
to sell The Post. Going private has its rewards. Being owned by a billionaire
who can afford to lose a little money may be preferable to remaining a piece of
a publicly traded company that is answerable to shareholders. Another rational thought, voiced
by my friend Gene Weingarten: If Don Graham says this is the right thing to
do, and Bezos will be a great owner, that’s good enough. Because I trust Don.
And there’s
the rub. So many times in recent years, as the industry has contracted, and
threatened to collapse entirely, I had my pole star. And he won’t be there
anymore. This is why it’s so difficult emotionally. When people
have asked me about the troubled business model of metropolitan newspapers,
I’ve always said I’ll be the last guy standing. But I never really believed
that. I thought I’d be the second-to-last guy. Don would be the last. It has been an honor to work at a place where
the person at the top is a terrific journalist. I remember years ago – the ’90s
– I suggested, in a moment of hubris, that we should get heavily in the
business of publishing books. Don said something like this: “Let’s put out a
great newspaper.” He’s read the paper every day, religiously, and sent those
notes that Ruth talked about. I think it was David Von Drehle who once said
that the Graham family’s continued willingness to support an array of foreign
bureaus even as revenues plummeted was a supreme act of patriotism.
A newspaper
is a special piece of a community. It’s a business, but it’s also a piece of
the civic infrastructure. One of the salutary trends of recent years is the way
the wall between the producers and consumers of news has been eroded. Every
article, blog, video, etc., now has reader comments; in some cases
the comments are more important and interesting than the professionally
rendered product. When a newspaper is truly successful it is not merely
something people use, but rather a part of their lives – a part of their day.
We come into people’s homes. This is why we don’t use foul language, usually,
and why we are careful what we say about the fat guy who comes down the chimney
at Christmas. So what I’d say to my new friend Jeff is that prosperity in the
future requires a cultivation of relationships – maintaining the relationships
with longtime subscribers (in print or online) and developing new relationships
with people around the country and the world.
There are
aggregators everywhere, and a proliferation of sources of information, but I
believe there is an added layer of credibility to something that runs under the
Washington Post brand name. Part of this is that we don’t publish everything we
hear. We filter, and our filter is finer than those of some of our rivals. If
it’s in the Post, it is supposed to have a marginally higher likelihood of
being true. “The Washington Post” will
be around for a long time in some fashion. Will that existence include a print
edition? I hope so. Print has many virtues, including portability and a kind of
tactile bandwidth, and it lends itself to graphic renderings of embedded
journalistic judgment (consider, for example, how you can tell from looking at
the front page of Tuesday’s Post how huge the news of the Post sale was,
according to the assessment of the Post editors and layout folks).
There are,
unfortunately, enormous costs associated with print journalism, starting with
the newsprint itself, the ink, the cost of transport around the city – like
Amazon, we deliver — and of course the salaries of reporters, editors,
photographers, graphic artists, layout editors, advertising sales people,
printers, press workers, drivers, and so on. One conceivable way this all plays
out, over time, is that the print edition disappears. If that happens, that
will be the decision by the customers, and although some of us will be weepy,
that’ll be the voice of the market speaking. You can’t sell people something
they don’t want.
But there
are basic principles of journalism that transcend “platform.” Like, get it
right. Be fair. Be thoughtful. Be courageous. And an underappreciated virtue of
journalism is “be interesting.” I would add, at the risk of being pretentious:
Make it beautiful. Dare to put literature in the newspaper. In the encomiums to
the greatness of The Post over the decades we always cite Watergate and the Pentagon
Papers, and overlook the countless times Henry Allen wrote something utterly
brilliant in Style, or Phyllis Richman told the bitter truth about a new
restaurant, or Tom Toles (and before him, Herblock) made us laugh about the
latest political squabble, or Sally Jenkins aimed a verbal dart at a superstar
athlete’s over-inflated ego.
A final
thought: This transition is jolting, and hard for us, but it is incorrect and
insensible to think that the newspaper business has ever been stable. Ask my
friends who worked for years at The Washington Star (or The Miami News). The
newspaper business is like life itself, in that you have to accept the simple
truth that no one here gets out alive. At some point down the road there will
probably not be a Washington Post as we’ve come to know it. But if there’s an over-under bet, I’ll take
the over on that. As soon as I scrape myself off the floor.
Bezos Buys Washington Post For $250
Million
(By William Launder, Christopher S. Stewart And Joann
Lublin, Wall Street Journal, 05 August 2013)
Jeff Bezos,
founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is buying the Washington Post and other
newspapers for $250 million, sending Washington Post shares up more than 5
percent in after-hours trading. The sale
puts one of the most famous newspapers in the U.S.—the publication credited
with breaking the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation
almost 40 years ago—in the hands of a Web businessman who rose to prominence
only in the past 20 years. It comes as
many newspapers are struggling to survive. Print newspaper ad revenues fell 55%
between 2007 and 2012, according to the Newspaper Association of America, as
advertisers and readers have defected to the Web. Some newspapers have been
forced to slash costs and in some cases file for bankruptcy. Just three days
ago the New York Times Co. sold the Boston Globe for $70 million, having paid
$1.1 billion for it in 1993.
The Internet
is "transforming almost every element of the news business," Mr.
Bezos said in a letter to Washington Post employees. "There is no map, and
charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we
will need to experiment," Mr. Bezos wrote.
He added that he won't be involved in the day-to-day management of the
newspaper. In an interview Monday,
Washington Post Co. Chairman Don E. Graham praised Mr. Bezos's track record as
a well-connected industry innovator with the patience to make difficult
businesses profitable, but he acknowledged challenges. "Jeff is a business person, not a
magician. He is going to have to work as hard as everyone else to figure out
the problem of news. But he brings a lot," Mr. Graham said.
Early this
year, Mr. Graham brought in investment bank Allen & Co. to begin looking
for someone to buy the Washington Post. The decision to sell had come after
months of reflection among the company's board members, said one person
familiar with the situation. Mr. Graham "couldn't see how to grow [the
paper] and began to wonder if there was a better owner," the person said. Mr. Graham spoke with many prospects
directly, drawing on his extensive network in Silicon Valley. Mr. Graham, who
has been an adviser to Facebook chief
Mark Zuckerberg, has spent years building relationships with technology titans,
including Mr. Bezos, who had helped him make important hires such as Amazon
veteran Vijay Ravindran, the head of WaPo Labs.
Several
months ago, Mr. Graham's bankers reached out to Mr. Bezos, said a person with
direct knowledge of the deal. Initially, Mr. Bezos held back, citing a lack of
time to properly deal with a transaction. Then, in July, Mr. Bezos wrote an
email to Mr. Graham saying, "If you're interested, I am," said
another person familiar with the situation.
Mr. Bezos, who launched Amazon in 1995, is worth about $26 billion,
courtesy of his stake in the e-commerce giant. As part of a planned stock sale,
Mr. Bezos took in $185 million this month, representing less than 1% of his
holdings. Forbes ranked him as the 19th most-wealthy man in the world, just
ahead of Google Inc.'s Larry Page. Mr.
Bezos wasn't available for an interview.
In
discussing a possible deal, Messrs. Graham and Bezos had two three-hour
conversations in person in Sun Valley, Idaho, before Mr. Bezos sent a personal
team to Washington, D.C. At the time, the company was talking to other suitors,
a small collection of individuals, like Mr. Bezos, and strategic companies,
said people familiar with the talks. The
company, which will keep its interests in education and television, will retain
its real estate, and a few journalism properties, including the website
Slate.com and Foreign Policy magazine. Recently, Post Co. has diversified with
small acquisitions in health-care and furnace parts. Over the past decade, the Post's daily
newspaper circulation has shrunk to 472,000 in 2012 from 769,000 in 2002. In
the company's newspapers division, revenue fell 31% to $582 million during the
same period, according to regulatory filings. Meanwhile, operating income over
the decade went from a profit of $109 million in 2002 to a loss of $53.7 million
in 2012.
To combat
the losses, the Post has gone through rounds of cost cuts. This year, it
replaced Marcus Brauchli as editor of the paper with Martin Baron. The Post has already sold Newsweek in 2010
after a sharp decline at the newsweekly. While the flagship newspaper was only
a small part of the company—which also owns cable systems, TV stations and the
Kaplan education business—a slump at Kaplan had added to financial stresses on
the company. Mr. Graham, whose
grandfather Eugene Meyer acquired the paper in 1933, said in a letter to staff
that "as the newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which
we have no answers," he and Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, his niece,
had begun "to ask ourselves if our small public company was still the best
home for the newspaper." The Post's
revenue had "declined seven years in a row," he noted, adding that
"our answer had to be cost cuts and we knew there was a limit to
that."
Mr. Graham
insisted that Mr. Bezos keep Ms. Weymouth on as CEO and publisher, as well as
Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager. In a separate letter, Ms. Weymouth described
today as one "my family and I never expected to come." Mr. Bezos had previously invested in the
business news website Business Insider. For Mr.
Graham, Mr. Bezos was a strong candidate because of his apparent genuine
interest in journalism, his strength in building technology products, and his
willingness to pay an appropriate price for the paper, said a person familiar
with the situation. Mr. Graham and the board also appreciated Mr. Bezos's past
help in finding strong employees for the Washington Post, such as Mr.
Ravindran, seeing it as a sign that he had a good understanding of the type of
people the Post needed.
One media
executive who knows Mr. Bezos said the Amazon chief likely sees the acquisition
as an opportunity to further develop the Washington Post's digital strategy in
a bid to show how old and new journalism can intersect. "He still sees a role for journalism,
and it's an extension of his interest in books and writers," said this
person. "It also gives him a pulpit in Washington. He might see that as a
plus, but it could also prove a minus based on the editorial positions the
newspaper takes." A large part of
the negotiation for the sale happened in private conversations between Mr.
Graham and Mr. Bezos. However, the Washington Post board also oversaw the price
and structure of the deal, said people familiar with the situation. Directors gave final approval to the sale
during a conference call Monday morning.
Mr. Graham, for his part, will continue to invest in other companies,
looking at "long-term focused companies with...strong management that we
can keep," the person said. In
addition to the Post, Mr. Bezos will get ownership of the Express newspaper,
the Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El
Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578650390383666794.html
Jeffrey
Bezos Aims For A New ‘Golden Era’ At The Newspaper
(By Paul Farhi, Washington
Post, September 3, 2013)
Jeffrey P.
Bezos, the next owner of The Washington Post, says he doesn’t have all the
answers for what’s ailing the newspaper industry or for the financially
challenged news organization he is preparing to buy. But he says he’s eager to
start asking questions and conducting experiments in the quest for a new
“golden era” at The Post. In his first
interview since his $250 million purchase of The Post was announced in early
August, Bezos said his basic approach to operating the business will be similar
to the philosophy that has guided him in building Amazon.com from a start-up in
1995 to an Internet colossus with $61 billion in sales last year. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that
we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the
customer first. Invent. And be patient,” he said. “If you replace ‘customer’
with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The
Post, too.”
Bezos, 49, spoke via phone from Seattle on Friday, four days
before he was scheduled to visit The Post for the first time since the
announcement of its purchase from The Washington Post Co. and the controlling
Graham family. The sale, which shocked the news industry, is expected to close
in October. Bezos said his major
contribution to the business will be in offering his “point of view” in
discussions with the paper’s leadership about how the publication should
evolve. He also said he provides “runway” — financial support over a lengthy
period in which the management can experiment to find a profitable formula for
delivering the news. “If we figure out a
new golden era at The Post . . . that will be due to the ingenuity and
inventiveness and experimentation of the team at The Post,” he said. “I’ll be there
with advice from a distance. If we solve that problem, I won’t deserve credit
for it.”
During his visit Tuesday and Wednesday, Bezos plans to meet
with Post publisher Katharine Weymouth and top managers of the paper’s business
and editorial operations. He will tour the newsroom in downtown Washington and
the production plant in suburban Springfield, Va. Wednesday’s visit will be bracketed by
meetings with Post journalists — first with about 20 reporters and editors in
the morning and concluding with a town hall-style meeting with the entire
newsroom in the afternoon. The last time Bezos encountered a roomful of the
paper’s journalists was in 1999, when he was the guest of Katharine Graham, the
company’s late chairman, during a luncheon interview with reporters and
editors.
Based on his comments in the interview Friday, Bezos appears
unlikely to make any major decisions or pronouncements during his visit or
propose any immediate changes. He said he is eager to meet with and listen to
managers and learn about the news organization’s operations. The Post is the first newspaper that Bezos
has owned and will be operated as a stand-alone business, independent of
Amazon. Bezos intends to keep his “day job” as chairman and chief executive of
Amazon and will continue living in Seattle, where the company is based. Bezos is one of the world’s richest men, with
a net worth of around $24 billion, based on the current value of his Amazon
stock holdings. His deep pockets, technological savvy and reputation as a
long-term strategic thinker were among the attributes that Post Co. chief
executive Donald E. Graham cited in selling him The Post after 80 years under
the Graham family’s control. Graham said he saw no alternative to continued
investment, which would be difficult for a publicly traded company.
Graham and Weymouth, his niece, quietly put the business up
for sale earlier this year after concluding that The Post required an owner
capable of making sustained investment in it.
Bezos agreed: “It’s important for The Post not just to survive, but to
grow,” he said. “The product of The Post is still great. The piece that’s
missing is that it’s a challenged business. No business can continue to shrink.
That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.” In the interview, Bezos stressed that he has
no immediate fixes for newspapers in general or for The Post, which is beset by
Web-based competition that has weakened its advertising base and steadily
sapped its print readership. “Don was
helpful in interviews [following the purchase] when he said, ‘Mr. Bezos is a
businessman, not a magician,’ ” Bezos said. “I thanked him for that afterwards.
In my experience, the way invention, innovation and change happen is [through]
team effort. There’s no lone genius who figures it all out and sends down the
magic formula. You study, you debate, you brainstorm and the answers start to
emerge. It takes time. Nothing happens quickly in this mode. You develop
theories and hypotheses, but you don’t know if readers will respond. You do as
many experiments as rapidly as possible. ‘Quickly’ in my mind would be years.”
But Bezos suggested that the current model for newspapers in
the Internet era is deeply flawed: “The Post is famous for its investigative
journalism,” he said. “It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars
into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of Web sites summarize that
[work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One
question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you
can’t, it’s difficult to put the right resources behind it. . . . Even behind a
paywall [digital subscription], Web sites can summarize your work and make it
available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, ‘Why
should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free’
from another site?”
Although he said he reads The Post, New York Times and Wall
Street Journal regularly, Bezos didn’t grow up immersed in newspapers or
dreaming of being involved with one. His “love affair,” he said, has always
been with “the printed word in all its forms.” Amazon started as an online book
retailer; it now publishes its own books. It has also moved into video
production, competing with Netflix and others in streaming original programs.
Bezos’s wife, MacKenzie, is a published novelist. The Internet and Amazon’s launch of the
Kindle e-reader convinced him that the printed word doesn’t have to be on
paper. “The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s
world,” Bezos said. “Great writers create an alternative world. It doesn’t
matter if you enter that world” via a digital or printed source.
After Graham broached the idea of Bezos buying the paper
earlier this year, Bezos said he spent two months contemplating what he could
bring to the business. He was convinced that The Post was “an important
institution,” and he said he was optimistic about its future. But he needed
time to think over a third issue. “I had
to convince myself that I could bring something to the table,” he said. “I
discussed this at great length with Don. I thought I could, because I could
offer runway and some skill in technology and the Internet and a point of view
about long-term thinking, reader focus and the willingness to experiment.” Added Bezos: “I’m a genetic optimist. I’ve
been told, ‘Jeff, you’re fooling yourself; the problem is unsolvable.’ But I
don’t think so. It just takes a lot of time, patience and experimentation.” Asked how he saw The Post — as a local,
national or international news organization — Bezos demurred. “That’s a
question that needs to be answered in concert with the leadership team of The
Post. Is it local? Or national? Is it something new?” Whatever the mission, he
said, The Post will have “readers at its centerpiece. I’m skeptical of any
mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece. Whatever the mission is, it
has news at its heart.”
Jeffrey P. Bezos Visits The Post To
Meet With Editors And Others
(By Craig Timberg and Paul Farhi, Washington Post, 03 September
2013)
The Jeffrey
P. Bezos era at The Washington Post had its symbolic beginning at 4:30 p.m.
Tuesday, when the high-tech magnate indulged in a decidedly low-tech ritual:
striking a triangle to summon editors for their afternoon meeting. The chimes, amplified electronically across
The Post’s historic newsroom, is a decades-old tradition. Bezos’s gesture
prompted a ripple of applause as he smiled for a photographer before walking
into the news meeting, part of a two-day tour of the news organization he
agreed to buy for $250 million last month.
Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, has vowed to protect
the paper’s journalistic independence while investing time and resources to
create a new “golden era” for The Post. The Graham family, which has owned the
paper for 80 years, decided to sell amid flagging revenue and circulation.
Dressed in
tan pants and a white shirt open at the collar, Bezos offered few clues about
his plans for The Post as he met with editors and company executives, they
said. Bezos, who is expected to close the deal for The Post in about a month,
maintained a genial, inquisitive manner punctuated by occasional outbursts of
laughter. Among others, Bezos met with
members of The Post’s editorial board on Tuesday, including Fred Hiatt, the
editorial page editor. Hiatt said it is too early to know how active Bezos will
be in shaping the newspaper’s editorial policies. But Hiatt observed, “It’s
entirely legitimate for an owner to have an editorial page that reflects his
world view. Some owners don’t want to get involved, some work through the
publisher, and some are very [directly] involved. I got the sense that he’s still
in exploring mode.”
On
Wednesday, Bezos plans to have breakfast with investigative journalist Bob
Woodward, lunch with senior editors and a meeting with about 20 other Post
journalists. After a tour of the newspaper’s production plant in Springfield, he
will hold a town hall meeting with the entire newsroom. During Tuesday’s visit, Bezos attended the
4:30 meeting as more of an observer than a participant, as is common with
visitors to the newsroom. Bezos sat to the left of Executive Editor Martin Baron,
near the head of the large table around which editors gather each day to
discuss upcoming stories. He listened
attentively as editors discussed the stories slated for Wednesday’s front page
and on the front pages of other sections.
Anne
Kornblut, deputy national editor, noted that two stories on Syria weren’t as
conflicting as they might initially appear — even though one argued that
members of Congress support military strikes while the other said many are
opposed. With both stories in the paper, Bezos quipped, “You know you can’t be
wrong!” to laughter around the room.
After editors offered their views on upcoming stories, he was offered a
chance to voice his opinion. “Do you
want to weigh in, Jeff?” asked Managing Editor Kevin Merida. Bezos replied, “No, I don’t, except that I’m
impressed with the process.”
Jeff Bezos To His Future Washington
Post Journalists: Put The Readers First
(By Paul Farhi and Craig Timberg, Washington Post, 04 September
2013)
Jeffrey P.
Bezos had a simple bit of advice for the staff of the newspaper he’ll soon own:
Put readers, not advertisers, first. Don’t write to impress each other. And
above all, “Don’t be boring.” In a
whirlwind series of meetings over two days, the Amazon.com billionaire charmed
and disarmed rooms full of skeptical journalists with a relentlessly upbeat
vision that evoked The Washington Post’s best traditions while promising to
update them for a technologically advanced new era. The Bezos plan for the news organization he
has agreed to buy for $250 million centers on recreating the “daily ritual” of
reading The Post as a bundle, not merely a series of individual stories. He was
bullish about creating that experience on tablet computers, lukewarm about the
prospects of doing so on the Web, and reassuring about the future of the
old-fashioned newspaper itself — at least for the foreseeable future. “People will buy a package,” Bezos said at
one meeting of reporters and editors. “They will not pay for a story.”
Bezos seemed
relaxed throughout two days of meetings, including a town-hall-style session in
The Post’s community room before hundreds of journalists. He spoke without
notes and joked often, punctuating some of his witticisms and self-deprecating
comments with explosive laughter. He remained poised and good-humored from his
perch on stage at the town-hall meeting despite fighting a balky sound system. Bezos also repeatedly emphasized the
importance of investigative journalism and said he was prepared to stand up to
pressure in reporting stories that government officials might seek to suppress.
He also said his political views were already in line with those of The Post’s
editorial page and would defer to its editor, Fred Hiatt, on many matters. “I don’t feel the need to have an opinion on
every issue,” Bezos said. “I’m sure I don’t know much about things like Syria
and foreign entanglements. I’m happy to let the experts opine on that.”
Among those
in attendance at the newsroom-wide meeting were former executive editors Ben
Bradlee and Leonard Downie Jr., former managing editor Robert Kaiser and star
investigative reporter Bob Woodward, lending the event an intergenerational
bridge to the newspaper’s storied past. (Donald E. Graham, whose family
controlled the newspaper for 80 years, was not there, but his niece, Post
publisher Katharine Weymouth, was in attendance). After 90 minutes of hearing Bezos lay out his
thoughts, Bradlee, 92, counted himself among those who came away with a
positive first impression. “I thought he was original,” he said. “That’s what
impressed me the most.”
Throughout
the day, Bezos returned to his idea of using tablets as a key vehicle for
reaching a new generation of readers. While saying The Post’s print editions will
remain for many years, he said tablet computers could offer readers a look and
feel similar to a traditional printed paper.
“You have to figure out: How can we make the new thing? Because you have
to acknowledge that the physical print business is in structural decline,” he
said. “You can’t pretend that that’s not the case. You have to accept it and
move forward. . . . The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past,
no matter how good it was, especially for an institution like The Washington
Post, which has such a hallowed past.”
In comments
that cheered the newsroom, Bezos said The Post needed to grow in both revenue
and readers, though he declined to say whether The Post newsroom would grow.
“What has been happening over the last several years can’t continue to happen,”
he said. “If every year we cut the newsroom a little more and a little more and
a little more, we know where that ends.”
Or as he put it repeatedly in meetings: “All businesses need to be
forever young. . . . If your customer base ages with you as a company, you’re
Woolworth’s.” Asked about the irony of
his interest in buying a newspaper and Amazon’s practice of not commenting for
many news stories, Bezos laughed and responded, “The most powerful minds can
hold powerful inconsistencies.” He said one reason he often declines to comment
is because he does not want his competition to know about his plans. “We’re not
as silent or secretive as we’re sometimes portrayed,” he said of Amazon,
conceding that “we are on the quiet side.”
Bezos, who
will remain in Seattle after his purchase of The Post closes in October,
sidestepped a question about his future involvement in the Washington area. “I
would never out-Don Don. Impossible,” he said, referring to Graham. “I will
have to do this as Jeff. And it’s going to be different for so many reasons,
and one of them is that I’m going to be in Seattle.” When asked to discuss Amazon’s motives in
cutting off Web services for WikiLeaks in 2010, a time of intense government
scrutiny of the anti-secrecy site’s disclosure of confidential military and
diplomatic documents, Bezos said that the decision was made by unit managers
and was not the result of government pressure. The company has previously said
that WikiLeaks violated Amazon’s terms of service.
Yet Bezos
made clear that though he believes in “American exceptionalism,” he sees The
Post’s traditional watchdog roles as essential.
“We’re not perfect and our elected officials are not perfect and our
regulators are not perfect,” he said in the newsroom question-and-answer
session. “The credibility that an organization like The Washington Post brings
is incredibly important.” The reaction
to the new boss from around The Post’s newsroom was widely favorable. “What was most impressive was the combination
of humility — that he doesn’t have all the answers yet — and the confidence
that he will somehow figure it out,” said Marc Fisher, a veteran reporter and
former Metro columnist. Added Valerie
Strauss, another Post veteran, who writes an education blog: “There was a lot
he didn’t say, but what he did was well received. It’s going to be a very
different place.” Post reporters have
already begun to refer to Bezos as “El Jeffe,” a play on the Spanish word for
“chief” or “boss.” He ended what amounted
to a two-day charm offensive by recalling for the newsroom his own encounter,
as a young boy in the 1970s, with the impact of Post journalism. After apologizing for potentially
embarrassing Woodward, Bezos said: “I watched the Watergate hearings on my
elbow on the living-room floor next to my grandfather, who didn’t turn them
off. And so these things make an impression.”
The Future
Of The Washington Post Co. Without Its Flagship Newspaper
(By Jia Lynn Yang,
Washington Post, 01 October 2013)
The sale
of the Washington Post newspaper Tuesday marked an emotional milestone for
its former parent company, but the firm’s future long ago stopped revolving
around its flagship publication. What
comes next is as much a mystery as the company’s new name, which has yet to be
unveiled. Chief executive and chairman Donald E. Graham is 68, with no obvious
successor. And Kaplan,
the education business that could constitute about two-thirds of the company’s
revenue, is in the middle of a massive turnaround. Without the newspaper, the firm’s focus on
Kaplan will be starker than ever, even as it maintains an odd assortment of
other subsidiaries — including a Phoenix-based cable business and a recently
acquired supplier
to boiler manufacturers — and hunts for ways to redeploy a small mountain
of cash from the $250 million
sale of the newspaper division to billionaire Jeffrey
P. Bezos.
A few surprising acquisitions this year have led to
speculation that Graham will turn his company into a mini-Berkshire
Hathaway, the legendary holding company run by longtime Graham family
adviser and former company board member Warren Buffett. As of June 30, before
the sale to Bezos, the company was sitting on nearly $387 million in cash. Graham bats down the idea of replicating
Buffett’s success. “No other company can be compared to Berkshire. There’s
nothing comparable and never will be,” he said in an e-mail. “We’ll do
acquisitions in different business lines, but not in the expectation we can do
anything remotely like Berkshire.” The
Post Co. has long had a history of making modest investments in seemingly
random industries, building those businesses patiently over time. While some
have gone sour, others have become major parts of the company. Executives and
longtime shareholders say that approach is unlikely to change. “I don’t think there’s necessarily a
playbook,” said Mark Hughes, director of research at Lafayette Investments in
Ashton, which owns Post
Co. shares. “I don’t think they wake up in the morning and say, ‘We want to
get into health care.’ I think they’ll look at everything coming down the road,
and if it makes sense they’ll make sensible offers.”
The Post Co. branched into education, cable and television
stations through these kinds of deals, allowing it to diversify far beyond
newspapers and become a $4 billion company of many different units, each
run very independently. Kaplan’s
higher-education business was turbocharged by a $165 million acquisition
in 2000, when The Post Co. acquired Quest Education, an Atlanta-based chain of
vocational schools. This year, the
company bought a majority
stake of Celtic Healthcare, a small hospice company, and purchased Forney,
a global supplier of products for power and industrial boilers. Beyond Kaplan, which is based in New York,
20 percent of the company’s revenue last year came from Phoenix-based Cable One,
which provides cable services largely in the country’s Western region. Ten
percent was from Post-Newsweek Stations, which owns six television stations
in Texas, Florida and Michigan. That means that without the newspaper, none of
the company’s major divisions will be based in the Washington region.
The company is also putting up for sale
its long-held downtown Washington headquarters, which is assessed by the D.C.
government at nearly $80 million. Even
without further acquisitions, there are plenty of other areas for the company
to tinker with in its existing business: publications such as Slate, The Root
and Foreign Policy; the WaPo Labs team, which is working on technology that
curates news for readers; and the social-media marketing firm SocialCode. The company also retains its
16.5 percent share of Classified Ventures, which runs Cars.com and
Apartments.com. The Post Co.’s share is worth about $300 million before
taxes, according to Craig Huber, an independent media analyst.
The company’s stock has been on a tear all year, rising
nearly 70 percent in 2013. The day the sale of the newspaper was announced
in August, the company’s stock rose to a five-year high — an indication of how
big a drag the newspaper had become to the company in the eyes of Wall Street.
Another contributing factor to the stock’s rise: The company’s TV stations have
become more highly valued as the sector profits from fees charged to cable and
satellite operators for the right to air local TV signals. It is not clear what the new company will be
named. Graham has even asked one of his daughters, an opera singer, to help him
come up with ideas, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the
condition of anonymity to talk openly about internal discussions.
But there is an even bigger question looming than the name,
and that’s who will succeed Graham. In five years, he will be the age of his
mother, Katharine Graham, when she stepped down from the chief executive post
in 1991 and handed the reins to her son. There are no obvious choices to outside
observers. Katharine Weymouth — The Post’s publisher and Graham’s niece — is
leaving the company to continue running the paper for Bezos, though she remains
a member of the board. Graham’s daughter Laura Graham O’Shaughnessy runs SocialCode, which nearly
doubled its revenue last year but remains a small part of the company. Then
there is Andy Rosen, who has run Kaplan since 2008. He is not a member of the
family but is deeply respected by Graham.
In the meantime, executives are hoping the sale of the
newspaper, however painful, means that the company’s top management will have
more time to attend to the less visible businesses. “Without Newsweek and The Post to distract
them, they’ll have a little more time to perhaps give us a little more
attention,” said Tom Might, head of Cable One. “We get such little attention. A
little more would probably be good.” But
the majority of Graham’s attention may well be focused on Kaplan, which says it
is trying to differentiate itself from competitors by emphasizing quality and
offering refunds to students who do not like what they see. “Most value investors who own [Washington
Post Co. stock], we don’t invest for WaPo Labs,” said James Pan, a shareholder
since 2005. “We just hope that frankly . . . Kaplan gets back to something
resembling normal.”
As Graham wrote in his annual letter to shareholders in
February, “the future of The Washington Post Company is the future of Kaplan.”
He added that even if Kaplan saw modest improvement in 2013, “we have a long
way to go.” Since its acquisition, no
single division has ever accounted for a bigger share of the company’s revenue
than Kaplan. But after years of being the company’s cash cow, the education
division’s profits have been clobbered by tougher government regulations and
scandals over predatory marketing techniques that damaged the reputation of
for-profit schools. Kaplan lost more
than $105 million in operating income last year, compared with a profit of
$206 million in 2008. The most recent quarters have shown some improvement.
Operating income in the second quarter was $23.7 million, compared with $3.7
million a year before.
There is also more competition from nonprofit and state
schools, which are increasingly offering online courses, an area where Kaplan
has been active for more than a decade. “We
see the increasing acceptance of online instruction as good for us, as we have
superior expertise in this arena,” Melissa Mack, Kaplan’s spokeswoman, said in
an e-mail. Kaplan University also has
offered a trial period to students, one of several ways it is trying to
rehabilitate its image. Graham says
demand will remain high for the education Kaplan offers. “People around the world will be hungry for a
quality education (of many types) for a long, long time to come,” Graham said
in his e-mail. “Kaplan can help serve those students.” Kaplan’s test prep business lost money last
year, as it has for a while now, though its numbers are improving. And the
company’s international business — now more than twice the size of the test
prep division— is growing in places such as Singapore. “There’s still no resurgence, but at least
it’s starting to show signs of a bottom the last four quarters,” said Huber,
the media analyst. “I think the world of
Don Graham as a manager,” said Hughes, of Lafayette Investments. “They’re
playing a tough hand there, between the difficulties with the newspaper and
Kaplan.”
As Bezos
Prepares To Take Over, A Look At Forces That Shaped The Post Sale
(By Steven Mufson,
Washington Post, 27 September 2013)
On April 4,
Donald E. Graham sat for a videotaped
interview about how the Internet and digital technology had hammered and
transformed the news business. Cradling a coffee cup emblazoned with the word
“Washington,” Graham sat next to his desk, with three Herblock cartoons on the
wall behind him and a photo of a young Warren Buffett on the table next to him. Graham gave a classic performance, telling
stories of bygone times in his disarming aw-shucks manner, dispensing
compliments to colleagues and rivals while mixing in his sober, analytical view
about the reporting-intensive newspaper business — and his failure to come up
with a way to sustain it. “One of the
questions that faces places like the [New York] Times and The Post is: Is there
any kind of a plus to a news organization in having really high-quality reporting
and editing?” he said at one point. “I’m pretty sure the answer to that is yes,
but we have not figured it out.” He added, “If somebody said to me there’s a way out for
newspapers, but you’re going to have to lose $100 million a year to get there
four to five years from now, I would sign up for it in a minute.”
But no one said that to him and unbeknownst to the three
veteran journalists interviewing him that day for Riptide, a journalism history
project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein center, Graham was trying to figure
his own way out — of the daily newspaper business. Quietly, he was shopping
around for a buyer, one without a political agenda but also one with a sense of
stewardship about the paper — and pockets deep enough to buy the franchise and
cover losses if necessary. Amazon
founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos ultimately agreed to buy the paper
himself for $250 million, also acquiring El Tiempo, Express, the local
Gazettes, and Robinson Terminal, including Robinson’s 23 acres of undeveloped
land in Charles County, Md.
He wasn’t the only billionaire wooed, however, and that
hadn’t been the only price discussed. Among others, Graham and the advisory
firm of Allen & Co. also approached Robert Allbritton, owner of Politico
and whose family once owned the Washington Star; Michael R. Bloomberg, who some
people believed would want a daily print outlet in addition to his
economic-driven subscriber news and data service; David Rubenstein, co-founder
of the Carlyle Group and a major Washington philanthropist; and Eric Schmidt,
who was chief executive of Google for 10 years.
The asking price in other negotiations reached $600 million, according
to people familiar with the talks; for one prospective buyer, the price was
significantly higher, according to a person whose advice was solicited by that
person. How Graham, who declined to be
interviewed for this piece, arrived at this point is both a financial and
personal story. For more than 20 years, there has been a growing sense of alarm
among The Post’s business executives about trends in the industry that could
destroy the franchise. Along the way, hard decisions have been made, some
underappreciated or forgotten, some of them recent and raw.
Through much of the turmoil the paper continued to undertake
noteworthy journalism and dramatically increase its online audience, but inside
the company, there have been long-standing questions: Who is the target
audience — and is it local or national? Or both? Should The Post have
cultivated more of a national identity online? Should the paper have started
Politico in-house? Should it have asked online readers to pay earlier? Should
it have devoted more effort to becoming a technology as well as media company?
And how big a newsroom does The Post need? But few people have any confidence that
different choices would have led to a different outcome. “I think it was
inevitable,” Jack Shafer, the media critic for Reuters, said of the financial
crisis at big-city dailies, noting the big write-off Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp. declared not long after buying the Wall Street Journal publisher Dow
Jones and Co. and that the New York Times’s stock lost three-quarters of its
value over the past decade. “They all did different things, and they’re all in
the same boat today. I don’t think Don or anyone else should beat themselves
up. Show me the paper that got it right.”
Now Bezos inherits not only the storied journalistic legacy
of the paper, but the strategic questions that go to the heart of the business
and the paper’s identity and its future. How can you take over a still
formidable newsroom and make money? Bezos’s combination of technology and
marketing savvy could help find the answer, and he has said he is “optimistic
about its future.” His decision to invest in the paper has other publications
suddenly paying close attention. Before
the sale was announced, few people thought that Graham, whose entire life was
entwined with the newspaper, could bring himself to sell it. “This was something no one thought Don could
ever contemplate,” his niece Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Post, said in
an interview. She said selling it was one of three scenarios she described to
Graham over a meal late last year at the Bombay Club on Connecticut Avenue, but
one she deemed “unthinkable.” Afterward, they went for a walk and talked it
over on a bench near the White House. “He
asked whether I was recommending that we sell The Post,” she said. “I said,
‘Not recommending; I don’t want to do it. But maybe there is somebody out there
who could invest more than we can . . . and shepherd The Post to a new
generation.’ ”
A couple of months later, Graham called former Post
president and venture capital executive Alan G. Spoon, who is still a trusted
adviser. “Are you sitting down?” Graham said, before telling him he was
thinking the unthinkable. “Up until the
day it was announced, I had not thought that the Graham family would ever
unload The Post,” said veteran newspaper industry analyst John Morton, “though
I have come to sympathize about why it’s better for the newspaper that they
did.”
A life in newspapers
The paper was Donald Graham’s destiny. When his grandfather
Eugene Meyer bought a competing paper and merged it with The Post, he told a
friend that “the real significance of this event is that it makes the paper
safe for Donnie.” Graham was then 8 years old.
He had an aptitude for it as well. He worked on the high school paper at
St. Albans. At Harvard, he sailed into the top job at the student daily, the Harvard
Crimson. After stints in Vietnam and on the D.C. police force, he joined
the reporting staff at The Post, became sports editor, and worked his way up so
that when he became publisher in 1979 people felt he had earned the job, not
just inherited it. His arrival at the
paper coincided with the newspaper’s fat years, with large and growing profits
and a large and growing newsroom. But in
recent years, the financial pillars of the newspaper industry have crumbled.
Major newspapers, including The Post, have lost lucrative classified
advertising to Craigslist and other Web sites. Print advertising has fallen at
alarming rates, a slide accelerated by the economic crisis; many local
retailers have also given way to national chains. Even online advertising has
been crimped because of massive competition and programmatic buying that
automatically sends ads to leverage unfilled Web inventory, which Web sites
make available at cheap rates.
Print circulation, too, has tumbled across the industry. At
The Post, average weekday circulation in the first half of this year hit
447,000, down 7 percent from the same period the year before and far below the
1993 peak of 832,332. Newspaper industry revenue slid from a record $49.4
billion in 2005 to $22.3 billion at end of last year, and the pattern at The
Post was the same. More problems are looming: Weymouth said one danger is that
some of the coupons now in print editions could migrate to mobile devices. Many Post executives and advisers have become
pessimistic. Spoon compared the business outlook to looking down a staircase at
a landing and trying to decide what condition the paper should be in to arrive
there in good shape. But what if the staircase is a spiral one without any
landing?
For more than a decade, the paper has been trimming the
newsroom while scrambling to establish a stronghold on the Web that could lead
to a more stable future. Graham has said recently that he no longer knows how
to make a quality newspaper viable nor does he have the stomach for cutting the
staff further. He said it was time for someone else with new skills – and more
money than could be spent by what Graham called “our
small public company.” Last year,
Graham gave no sign of thinking that way. In July 2012 when Reuters columnist Shafer
gave Graham advance word about a piece proposing the sale of the paper to
Bloomberg, Graham wrote back and said: “Thank you. I will ignore your advice as
usual.”
Less than a year later, his view changed. “Our revenues had
declined seven years in a row,” Graham told the staff when he announced the
Bezos acquisition. “We had innovated and, to my critical eye, our innovations
had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn’t made up
for the revenue decline. Our answer had to be cost cuts, and we knew there was
a limit to that.” Bezos could resemble
Graham’s grandfather, who made a fortune in finance, bought The Post at a
bankruptcy auction and sustained losses for 21 years while building the paper’s
reputation and readership. “I think it
was wrenching” for the Graham family to sell, Weymouth said. “But everyone
wanted to do what was best for The Post ultimately. It’s not about what’s best
for the Grahams.”
Although the sale of the newspaper might be in the best
interest of its journalism, it was, in fact, also in the best interest of the
family fortune and shareholders. Current trends were eroding the value of The
Post franchise. It was only in 2010 that The Post had sold
Newsweek to 91-year-old audio equipment pioneer Sidney Harman for $1 — and
later the publication folded. No one at the company wanted to repeat that. “This also had major ramifications for
preserving the wealth of the Graham family in addition to other shareholders,”
said Morton, the newspaper analyst. There
is a personal dimension as well. Graham has had differences over style and strategy
with his niece, who was groomed to take over the paper and will remain
publisher. Unlike Graham, she declined an offer from then-executive editor
Leonard Downie Jr. to work as a suburban reporter. Instead, over 17 years, she
rose through the ranks of the general counsel’s office and advertising
department before becoming publisher. And unlike Graham, she took charge of the
paper in 2008 just as the bottom fell out of the industry and the entire
economy.
Some critics have faulted Graham for not casting a wider net
to find leadership to manage the crisis.
“Where I do fault the family is, at this pivotal time for the business,
the industry, for our democracy . . . they went and got another member of the
family,” said Alan Mutter, a veteran media executive and author of the blog
Reflections of a Newsosaur. “I don’t disrespect Katharine, but is it possible
that of all the people in newspapers or digital media that she was the one?” “There’s a lot to be proud of,” Weymouth
said. “Do I wish we had been more successful? Sure.” Graham, who votes 86.6 percent of the
controlling A-class shares through his own stock and that in family trusts he
oversees, has a strong sense of family and an aversion to conflict and
publicity. He does not criticize Weymouth. He has said she needed to make her
own choices, even mistakes, without second-guessing from him. Moreover,
Weymouth, daughter of Graham’s sister, Lally, had been a favorite of his
mother, Katharine Graham.
One key deliberation was the imposition of fees for frequent
online readers, a step taken earlier by the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times and the Financial Times. As others adopted such fees, The Post was
criticized as being late. People who
have spoken to Graham and Weymouth privately say he remains skeptical about the
benefits of the model, fearing that the income from digital subscriptions won’t
be enough to make up for a loss in advertising if online readership falls
precipitously. Weymouth and her top business executive, Stephen P. Hills,
pushed for it for some time, arguing that it could generate a new, stable
revenue and slow the ebb of print subscribers to the otherwise free online
version of the paper. Graham was incensed when word of the plan was leaked to
the Wall Street Journal in early December 2012. At that point, a news release
had already been drafted; it was shelved for weeks until Graham gave final
approval. “It should be a plus for The
Post if we execute it right,” Graham said later, in the April interview. “Steve
Hills and Katharine Weymouth have really thought this through. . . . They’re
doing it in a way that’s well suited to us. It will be successful, but I don’t
think it will be a huge difference maker.”
Graham, unlike Weymouth, is absorbed by the
technology-oriented work of the company’s WaPo Labs unit, which is run by a
former Amazon executive Vijay Ravindran and is not being sold to Bezos. The
unit is developing digital technologies that might “enhance and support” the
newspaper division, luring more readers and ad dollars. Roughly 25 million
people on Facebook downloaded its Social Reader, but use of the service
dwindled as fast as it had caught on. Graham
also was unhappy about the open friction between Weymouth and former executive
editor Marcus W. Brauchli, though he welcomed the eventual appointment of
Martin Baron to the job.
Graham, by comparison, is nothing if not discreet. He even
kept his efforts to sell the paper a secret from his sister Lally Weymouth, a
longtime Newsweek and Washington Post contributor, until shortly before the
deal was announced. His sister was very upset, acquaintances say, but her work
will continue to appear in Slate and The Post’s Outlook section, though the
paper will no longer pay her $300,000 salary. Above all, however, the decision to sell The
Post wasn’t just a matter of family relations, but rather the final step in a
financial decline whose roots date back more than 20 years, according to
interviews with current and former Post business and editorial executives,
executives at other companies who have discussed strategy with Graham, and
outside analysts.
Asked when he first became alarmed about the viability of
the newspaper, Hills says: 1992. That’s when the realization set in “that big
circulation declines were likely coming, regardless of what we did,” he says. “Before there was an Internet, before there
was an AOL, the circulation of newspapers was going down,” Graham said in the
April interview, which was part of the “Riptide” project carried out by former
Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey, New York Times veteran Martin Nisenhotlz,
and Paul Sagan, a former new media director at Time Inc. and former CEO and now
executive vice chairman of Akamai Technologies, which provides technology
advice to businesses. Graham’s interview and others are posted on the Web site.
In 1992, Robert G. Kaiser, then managing editor, attended
conferences in Silicon Valley and Japan about the future of digital media. It
was before the explosion of the Web or laptops, and on the flight home, Kaiser
wrote — longhand — a memo to Graham and other top executives. “The world is changing with amazing speed,
and we need to pay close attention to what is happening. . . . No one in our
business has yet launched a really impressive or successful electronic product,
but someone surely will,” Kaiser wrote. “The Post ought to be in the forefront
of this — not for the adventure, but for important defensive purposes. We’ll
only defeat electronic competitors by playing their game better than they can
play it. And we can.”
The Post did try to act on some of Kaiser’s insights. Among
other technology ventures, the paper drew up prototypes and in 1993 even
launched an online product, Digital Ink, which charged for access on a
proprietary AT&T platform and had about 30,000 subscribers. By late 1995 as
the potential for the Web became apparent and readers turned to faster,
easier-to-use Web browsers, Graham and Spoon changed gears and turned to an
ad-supported Web model. As Spoon put it later, The Post was “winning the county
track meet, but the Olympics lay ahead.”
Spoon, a lawyer who did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, was anxious to keep The Post ahead. “As AOL was coming
on, I’d go to the movies, there was ‘Sleepless
in Seattle.’ There was the e-mail going back and forth. Everybody’s laughing.
And I’m suffering,” he said in a March interview
for the Riptide project. In an interview
for this article, Spoon said: “The Post was early. The board gave me and Don
license to build for the Internet. We lost a lot of money on the way and thank
God we did. We built a platform early.”
The Web venture brought tension with the newsroom. Graham
put the Web operation in Arlington, in part to sidestep the union but mostly to
let it develop outside a newsroom he felt was stuck in a different era and was
antagonistic to the Web. Critics say the separation of the newsroom and Web
operation impeded coordination and duplicated tasks. One example of the difference between the
immediacy of the Web and the traditions of the newsroom: During the 1998
Microsoft antitrust trial, Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran was sending
reports at midday and Spoon thought they should be put on the Web immediately,
while Downie, then the executive editor, thought the story was incomplete and
publication should wait until it was ready for the newspaper’s print edition.
The Post was also slow to hire its own technology experts
and engineers. “To me, that is one of our central failures,” Graham said in the
Riptide interview. As a result, much of The Post’s software was clunky or slow,
frustrating people inside the company who were trying to compete in the
minute-to-minute race of the Web as well as readers who, armed with high-speed
broadband, wanted faster page loading times or had trouble finding articles.
Each wave of new technology — most recently mobile and video — brought new
challenges.
Tangled Web strategy
Nonetheless, in 2000 The Post’s Web site was up and running
and the cliffhanger election between Al Gore and George W. Bush drew a surge of
traffic. “After the 2000 election, a large Web audience came to The Post
without a dime spent on marketing,” said then-managing editor Steve Coll, who
is now dean of Columbia University’s school of journalism. “It was like a giant
crowd was standing out in the street, and we were looking down on them without
knowing whether we should just throw them our chicken bones or try to give them
more.”
One of the defining moments in the story of The Post was the
2003 managers’ meeting at the Inn at Perry Cabin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Coll proposed tapping the paper’s national and international reputation and
putting more resources into making The Post’s Web site into the digital world’s
top news site. He believed that big-city dailies were marching like lemmings
off a cliff, with the weakest going first and The Post, among the strongest,
going last but still going. “There were
measurable and fairly certain risks in staying the course that would lead to
the cliff’s edge and the only question was how quickly,” he said in a interview
for this story. “The other course was to turn around and take a substantial
risk using debt to buy things and reposition the paper and its journalism. It
might fail spectacularly, but it would be noble.”
In response, Graham “dumped all over it,” said another
editor who attended the session. Graham reiterated his mantra that the paper
was and would remain a local business, with a still enviable local market
penetration and local ads. Remember the Loudoun County fireman, he said, he’s
our customer. Even if the local ads were vanishing, they were, and still are, a
key revenue source for the paper. They also make up a sizable chunk of the
online ads. For a variety of reasons,
Coll left the paper about a year later. Although supporting the continued expansion
of the Web site, Graham has remained committed to that local business model.
While the New York Times expanded international and national bureaus, and
widened its lead in online readership, The Post trimmed its foreign staff and
shut down all of its domestic bureaus outside Washington. When it came to
building a large national audience, the paper increasingly relied on its
expertise about Washington.
To a degree, Graham associated the national ambitions of the
staff with an elitism he disliked. True, his own pedigree was privileged, but
he had balanced it with his stints in Vietnam and as a police officer, and a
passion for improving the education of the District’s least fortunate. “We got better and better educated, our
staffs. Washington, which is a fabulously educated market, has 40 percent
college graduates, but The Post newsroom is 100 percent college graduates,” he
said to Huey. “We stopped being as interested, all of us, including me, in the
comics, the horse racing, which used to be a big deal.” Weymouth said, “The Times serves the 1
percent, the elite,” albeit on a national scale. By comparison, she said,
Graham had decided that The Post would be “for teachers, taxi drivers, and
police officers as well as the Hill.” She said, “We want to serve the real
people.”
‘Don’t lose money’
At the time of the Coll debate, it looked as though cutbacks
would be inevitable, but Graham and others underestimated the magnitude of the
pressure to come. Coll recalls that Graham “would say in this ‘someday, my son,
this will all be yours’ sort of way, that I would have to cut 2 percent a year
out of newsroom for next 10 years. I thought that’s not so bad. The first five
are a gimme.” So, Coll recalls: “I would say to people we have 10 or 15 years
to figure this out. And I think Don thought we had 20 years. It turned out we
had five years.” In mid-2008, just after
the paper won six Pulitzers for work done the year before, 231 people in the
newspaper division took buyouts, creating $79.8 million in charges and
contributing to the first
overall operating loss since the company went public 37 years earlier. In 2009, The Post closed a costly printing
plant that had been opened only 11 years earlier.
As buyout followed buyout in the newsroom, tension rose.
Hills and Weymouth absorbed a great deal of the newsroom criticism, and it
didn’t help that Weymouth — and other company executives — received hefty
performance bonuses that people in the newsroom felt were a reward for cutting
staff. “Cutting can enforce a certain discipline. It forces you to look at what
readers value,” Weymouth said. But, she added in an interview: “The mission was
to cut as little as possible. The marching orders from Don and the board were
‘don’t lose money.’ ” Asked whether that was the right strategy, she deferred
to her uncle. “Don was the one pushing
the budget cuts,” a onetime senior Post newsroom executive said on the
condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “He always gets off easy as
the avuncular figure up on the ninth floor.”
“It’s a very reasonable objective set by a very reasonable guy who just
wanted to make a little money,” one senior business executive said.
Tighter budgets inflamed friction over visions of what The
Post should be. How much should it generate with its own original reporting vs.
piggybacking on work generated elsewhere as is done at Gawker and many other
online publications? Should it aspire to be very good, or, in the words of one
Post business executive, just good enough? Should it compare itself with the
New York Times, a national publication, or crumbling big-city dailies whose
business models were historically closer to The Post’s? This played out in battles over newsroom
budgets and control over areas such as who should control the design of
applications for mobile phones. Hills tangled not only with then-executive
editor Brauchli, but other senior company people, too. Hills compared The Post
to the Huffington Post and the newspaper in Dayton, Ohio. He had what was
supposed to be an off-the-record conversation in spring 2012 with a small group
of reporters at the home of former staffer Bradley Graham, where he described a
more limited vision of the paper’s ambitions and resources. The most
inflammatory comments were all leaked to the publication AdWeek.
Hills believed his comments were misinterpreted, and that
the newsroom needed to face the financial reality. True, no one in the newsroom wanted to be
Dayton, but even the Times offered limited comfort as a business model. It,
too, has bought out some reporters as it struggles with declining revenue and a
heavy debt load. A year later, Graham
was staring down The Post’s financial realities. “Don gave me numbers for the
next several years’ finances,” Spoon said. “He wasn’t forecasting profits.”
The Buffett effect
Another factor in Graham’s decision: Warren Buffett. Graham
repeatedly talks about his responsibility to shareholders, and there is no
bigger outside shareholder than Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, with 27.68
percent of stock. Buffett was a director of The Post Co. for 26 years and an
adviser and confidant of Don’s mother, Katharine, for even longer. He also guided investments related to the
pension fund, finding two talented managers who made it vastly overfunded — an
anomaly in American business. A sizable chunk of Berkshire Hathaway stock
helped. That cushion helped finance the buyouts in recent years. At the end of
2012, the fund had an excess of $605 million, more than 40 percent beyond its
obligations.
Even as Graham is getting out of the business, Buffett is
jumping in. Buffett continues to predict declines in ad, circulation and
profits of newspapers. But over a 15-month period through March 1, he spent
$344 million to buy 28 newspapers — including his hometown paper, the Omaha
World-Herald. In his annual
letter to shareholders, he noted that the papers were very cheap and added
that while they weren’t growing they still “should be profitable for a long
time to come.” Yet Buffett’s vision of
newspaper success doesn’t reflect The Post’s model. He bought mostly small
newspapers from Media General, leaving behind the chain’s Tampa newspaper. He
has also shut down one of the papers he did buy. In his annual report, he said
that big newspapers have lost their primacy in many areas, but that they can
keep that primacy in local news where people read about the mayor, taxes or
high school football. “A reader’s eyes
may glaze over after they take in a couple of paragraphs about Canadian tariffs
or political developments in Pakistan; a story about the reader himself or his
neighbors will be read to the end,” Buffett wrote.
But The Washington Post Co. isn’t Berkshire Hathaway. If the
Graham family wanted to, it could sink more money into the newspaper instead of
diversifying, as it has recently, with small acquisitions in the hospice and
boiler ignition businesses. After all, with two classes of stock, A and B shares,
the family holds the only votes that counted.
“The whole idea of the dual stock structure was to preserve the family’s
interest,” Morton said. “The only thing that would happen to the newspaper
would be what the family would have wanted to happen. The theory was that if it
came to it they could thumb their nose at Wall Street. And the company in early
days did.” Over the years the company
had branched out into a cable provider and half a dozen broadcast television
stations. Morton believes the acquisition and growth of the Kaplan education
division altered that attitude even more. “The company changed when they got
hold of Kaplan. As Don acknowledged, ‘We’re no longer a newspaper company but a
company that happens to own a newspaper.’ ”
The erosion of the newspaper franchise has made it less
important to shareholders. In 1991, the newspaper division — then as now mostly
The Post itself — was 47 percent of total company revenue; now it has shriveled
to about 15 percent. “Previous
management of the newspaper (that would be me) did not see clearly the drastic
changes that were coming to this business,” Graham wrote in the annual report
for 2009. Wall Street and investors seem buoyant about its sale. The Friday
before the sale announcement the stock, which had risen sharply earlier in the
year, was selling for $559.95 a share. On Friday the stock closed at $610.99 a
share. “There’s really only one loser in
this,” said a longtime Post company executive, “and that’s Don.”
Trying to fill the gaps
In his 2012 annual report, Buffett noted that for decades
newspapers made money with little effort. “As long as a newspaper was the only
one in its community, its profits were certain to be extraordinary; whether it
was managed well or poorly made little difference,” he wrote. “As one Southern
publisher famously confessed, ‘I owe my exalted position in life to two great
American institutions — nepotism and monopoly.’ ” The Post also suffered because for years ad
sales people could essentially wait for the phone to ring; sales now require a
more aggressive and creative strategy. A senior Post business executive
acknowledged as much, albeit with a jab at the news department. “We were
monopolists in the ad department,” the executive said, “and we were monopolists
as journalists.”
In the 1990s, Spoon and many others thought digital ad
revenue would not only fill in the gap left by declining print ads but exceed
them. That didn’t turn out to be the case because advertisers could count
clicks and sought to drive down the price they paid for each one. And even
though The Post tried a variety of online methods to hang on to classified ads
leaving the paper, the competition for such ads remained fierce. “The problem was the newspaper was a package
and you could sell that package. People would pay a quarter and while they were
at it would see a tire ad or movie review,” said another former Post executive.
“And you got a tremendous return on that investment. . . . The Web means you
have to compete for every click.”
“I think it’s going to be challenging for broad-based,
general interest news to bring together in one place, electronic or print, what
used to be the bundle that was offered because of fragmentation,” Spoon said in
his March interview with Huey, before he learned that Graham was going to sell
the paper. What lies ahead, he says is “personalization, user-generated
content, professional- and user-sourced curation. When the tiles come back together, it’s not
going to look like the painting with just three colors inside a given frame.
It’s going to be different for every person,” he said.
Missed opportunities
Many people at The Post mourn missed opportunities, and with
the benefit of hindsight there have been many. The Post sought to invest in
Facebook at an early stage, an investment that would now be worth several
billion dollars. The late Christopher Ma, a Post executive whose daughter knew
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, helped bring together Zuckerberg
and Graham, who agreed on an investment. But Zuckerberg later opted to go with
a venture capital firm with more tech experience and Graham politely bowed out. Some critics have said that The Post erred by
failing to hang on to staffers John Harris and Jim VandeHei instead of letting
them go to Allbritton and start Politico, which has its own ambitions to become
a Washington player and stake a claim in the political reporting niche. Graham
says, however, that while reporters at The Post compete with Politico, from a
business point of view Politico is not a significant competitor. Spoon has said The Post lost out by not buying
more cable networks or television stations when they were far cheaper than they
are now. It looked at investing in eBay, but didn’t.
One miss that isn’t mourned: The Post’s bid for the Boston
Globe. It lost to the New York Times, which paid $1.1 billion in 1993. In
August, the Times
sold the Globe for just $70 million.
To some analysts, greater investment success — or continued big profits
at the now-struggling Kaplan education unit — would have given Graham a greater
ability to subsidize losses at the newspaper.
But people who know Graham say he doesn’t think that way. “It’s each
business on its own bottom,” Spoon said. “That’s the way it’s always been run.” One senior Post Co. executive says that
greater investment success wouldn’t have changed Graham’s mind. “Having a lot
of money in the bank is hardly a guarantee that you will solve all these
problems,” he said. “The company always had enormous borrowing capacity. But
Don felt what it was going to take was not something that could be easily
envisioned within the confines of a public company.”
Some longtime Post business people respect Graham’s decision
but don’t necessarily agree with it. As the senior executive put it, if you had
called an ad company and asked what it would cost to build the kind of reputation
the paper had, the answer would have been: untold millions. That might be one reason Bezos is investing
in the paper. “I knew the quality of the people would be very high,” he said on
ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday. “The business challenges in the
newspaper industry have nothing to do with the quality of the people. These are
big industry-wide trends.”
A sense of loss
Even people who have differed with Graham tend to feel
loyalty toward him. “I love Don and would step in front of a bus for him,” Coll
said. Even though Graham didn’t adopt his strategy, Coll said, “I don’t feel
aggrieved about any of this.” Meanwhile,
Graham isn’t completely done with the news business. Slate and Foreign Policy
were not part of the Bezos purchase. Neither was WaPo Labs, whose head,
Ravindran, Graham has called “the most valuable player at The Washington Post.”
Graham is also a fan of a WaPo Labs software called Trove, which gave rise to
Social Reader. After the sale of the paper, the company will launch a new
version of Trove, a tool for creating personalized newspapers. Although Trove
failed to get traction upon its first release, Social Reader has been
downloaded by nearly 25 million Facebook users, whose contacts could help jump
start a new marketing drive.
The remaining company will also include Social Code, a
social media marketing agency, which Graham said in the most recent annual
report was the fastest-growing part of the entire company, albeit from a small
base. Graham wrote that its revenue “almost doubled” and that it had “set
ambitious plans for 2013 and beyond.” He also noted it is run by Laura Graham
O’Shaughnessy, his daughter. But there
is still a sense of loss among some on the business side who were attracted to
work for the company because of the mission and prestige of working for the
paper. And unlike some families, said one business executive, there was never
any question among the corporate children about which child was loved most.
In the April video, the family legacy literally hangs over
Graham in the set of cartoons drawn by the late Herbert Block, who went by
Herblock. “A newspaper should serve as
the conscience of its community,” said Graham’s grandfather Eugene Meyer, who
bought The Post out of bankruptcy in 1933. Those words were written across a
flag that towered over the Capitol and Washington Monument in the first of the
Herblock cartoons hanging behind Graham in his office. The second cartoon, inscribed to Katharine
Graham, shows the desk of her late husband, Phil, with a note reading: “The
Post is an independent newspaper . . . fixed with a love of liberty, capable of
indignation over injustice, and aware of the destiny and responsibility of
America as a world leader . . . ”
In the
third, done after Katharine Graham’s death, an angel with a bugle hovers above
a cloud next to a figure inscribing Kay’s name in a book. Above the caption
reads: “Call Horace Greeley and Joe Pulitzer and the rest, and tell them she’s
here.” What this very public figure and
very private person is feeling on the eve of the sale isn’t completely clear.
Graham says he’s tired of talking about it and wants to leave the talking to
Bezos, Weymouth and Baron. But it’s clear he’s leaving with a mixed sense of
accomplishment and regret. At one point
in the April interview, there was this exchange:
Huey: “The
truth is, we haven’t found very many stupid people going around interviewing
for these things.”
Graham: “Yes
you have. You’ve found plenty of people who weren’t smart enough, including
me.”
Katharine Weymouth Defends Decision Not To Fund Ezra Klein’s New
Venture
(By Harry Jaffe,
Washington Post, 29 January 2014)
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has absorbed the
responsibility—much of it critical—for not keeping Ezra Klein and his
proposed new digital-media venture at the Post. How could Bezos, the digital entrepreneur who
created Amazon.com, not buy into Klein’s vision of a website devoted to
delivering news and opinion at the digital edge of journalism? How could he
allow the phenomenally prolific creator of the Post’s Wonkblog to take
his talents elsewhere? Actually, Post
publisher Katharine Weymouth was the decider. “It just didn’t make sense for us,” Weymouth
tells
Washingtonian. “Ezra didn’t want it to be part of the Post.
It would be completely separate and quite resource-intensive.”
Klein first brought his proposal to Post
executive editor Martin Baron in December. Baron recommended Klein go
directly to Weymouth, who runs the Post’s business side. Klein
met with Weymouth and described his new venture in a memo with a full business
plan, including projected expenses and revenues. Weymouth says she
examined the business plan for what she termed “a kind of authoritative wiki,”
and decided the investment didn’t make sense. Klein reportedly projected the
cost of building his new venture to be upward of $10 million, with up to 30
employees. “It seemed to be potentially
a bigger distraction that would take resources without building the Post,”
Weymouth says. “Had he wanted to keep Wonkblog within the Post, that
would have been a different story.”
Weymouth sent Klein’s proposal with her
decision against funding it to Bezos. She did not hear back from him. In other
words, Bezos accepted her decision to go thumbs down on Klein’s proposition. Weymouth said she was “not shocked” that
Klein would present her with a bold plan to create his own digital news
operation. She described Klein, 29, as “young, smart, and entrepreneurial.” She
explained her decision to spike Klein’s proposal face to face. “I admire him and emphasized that we wanted
very much to leave the door open to working with us in the future,” Weymouth
says. Neither Bezos nor Klein responded
to questions of whether they had had any contact after Weymouth declined the
offer.
The heart of Weymouth’s case was that
there’s no guarantee Klein’s publication will be profitable. Wonkblog has reportedly attracted 4
million visitors a month while Klein ran it at the Post, but income from
that number of eyeballs will not support a new, independent newsroom of the
scope and size Klein envisions. And according to the Post, Wonkblog
averaged 2.7 million visitors a month in 2013, rather than 4 million. Klein
announced this week he will establish his new publication with Vox Media. It’s
scheduled to debut this spring as “a site that’s as good at explaining the
world as it is at reporting on it,” Klein wrote on Vox’s technology site, the
Verge.
More than a few news commentators and
analysts panned the Post for allowing another talented writer take his
energies elsewhere. “You idiots!” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman
on his blog earlier this month. Klein’s exit invited comparisons to Post
writers John Harris and Jim VandeHei, who left the Post to
start Politico. Weymouth, the
granddaughter of legendary publisher Katharine Graham and the last family
member at the Post’s helm, is bullish on the enterprise Klein is leaving
behind. “Wonkblog is staying at the Post,”
she says, “and we are going to invest heavily in building on what it is today.
We had hoped that Ezra would want to lead that, but he wants to build something
very different.”
Marty Baron: What’s To Come In 2014
By Marty Baron, Washington Post, 29 January 2014)
Memo to
newsroom staff from Marty Baron, Executive Editor:
As we put
the final touches on the budget for 2014, I want to share our plans for a set
of exciting initiatives. This will be a year of impressive investment in The
Washington Post, with the primary goals of growth and digital transformation. Recent announcements have offered a hint of
what’s in the works. We just announced
that Adam Kushner, executive editor of the National Journal, will head a new
digital initiative for online commentary and analysis. We now begin hiring for
his team. Before that, we announced that
Fred Barbash would return to The Post from Reuters, where he has been running
White House and congressional coverage. He’ll head up an overnight staff to
assure that readers have the most comprehensive, engaging reading experience
when they wake up every morning.
We announced
that Jim Tankersley, one of the best economics writers around, would lead a
digital initiative, driven by data and narrative storytelling, that explains
complex public policies and illuminates their human impact. We are hiring for
that team while continuing our years of robust and enthusiastic investment in
Wonkblog (and its most recent spinoff, KnowMore). We also have announced some staff additions
to The Fix blog and our politics strike force, key elements of our online
political coverage. We have some more hiring to do. Altogether, our staff of
politics reporters will grow by five early this year. Along with the new writers we’ve introduced
for Reliable Source, Helena Andrews and Emily Heil, we’re giving it a strong
digital presence. That includes adding a staffer to produce Reliable Source
video.
That is just
a start. We are hiring writers to author
“verticals” on a wide array of subjects. These blogs will both deepen our
reporting in The Post’s traditional areas of concentration and broaden the
range of subjects we cover. Last year, we added highly popular blogs such as
The Switch and GovBeat, complementing other policy-oriented blogs like
WorldViews and Wonkblog. Some of our current blogs will get additional writers,
enhancing our national and world report, and all of them will work with an
expanded staff of photo editors and data visualization specialists. We’re
hiring now for the additional graphics and photo staffers.
We also will
embark on a long-planned site redesign that should improve load speeds and
navigation while enhancing the overall reader experience. That will involve new
hires. The Universal News Desk also will add to its staff to make sure that we
are doing everything possible to engage readers when they come to the site. Beyond the
new overnight crew, we will create a breaking-news desk that will operate from
8 a.m. until midnight. Reporting to Justin Bank, it will position us to jump on
the most captivating stories of the day at lightning speed.
Print is in
the picture, too. This spring, we will
introduce an expanded Sunday magazine, bigger in dimension and in the number of
pages, with a new design and a range of new features. This spring also will see
us introduce a Sunday Style & Arts section that makes a forceful and
elegant statement about our strengths in those areas. You can tell that there is a lot going on.
And there’s more than I mentioned. We can’t talk about everything just yet. This is a news organization of extraordinary
achievement. It is home to journalists of immense talent and dedication. With
these initiatives, we can all look forward to a future of great promise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2014/01/29/marty-baron-whats-to-come-in-2014//?print=1
Trump Targets
Amazon In Morning Twitter Attack
(By Abha Bhattarai, Washington Post, 29 March 2018)
President Trump once again lashed out at Amazon.com, the online
retailing giant, on Thursday morning, saying he has long had concerns about the
company’s business practices. Trump has periodically criticized Amazon
before and since becoming president. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief
executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post. Trump’s latest
critique comes after Amazon’s stock took a hit Wednesday following the
publication of a report in Axios that Trump was “obsessed” with the retail
giant, according to a person interviewed by the publication. Shares fell more
than 4 percent on Wednesday and continued their tumble Thursday, falling more than
3.8 percent in morning trading.
Some of Trump’s claims about Amazon have not been based on complete
information. Amazon, for example, does collect taxes on products it sells to
customers in the 45 states with a sales tax. Items sold by third-party vendors,
however, may have different arrangements. The company has also said it supports
legislation that would require other online retailers to pay state and local
sales taxes. Amazon and U.S. Postal Service declined to comment on
Trump’s tweet Thursday.
Trump’s use of social media to call out individual people and
companies has been unprecedented for a president. His other Twitter targets
have included Apple, Boeing and General Motors, as well as media outlets
including The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN. The president
has long been vocal with his disapproval of Amazon. Trump has frequently
complained about Amazon and Jeff Bezos to his friends, according to people who
have spoken with the president. For example, at a dinner last month at Mar-a-Lago
with Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera and the president’s two adult sons,
Donald Jr. and Eric, Trump brought up Amazon and said they should pay more in
taxes, according to a person familiar with the dinner.
In December, Trump attacked the company’s arrangement with the U.S.
Postal Service and called on the agency to raise the shipping rates it charges
Amazon. “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many
billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to
deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and
poorer?” he tweeted. “Should be charging MUCH MORE!”
His tweets about the USPS reflect a debate about whether the Postal
Service is charging Amazon and other retailers enough to deliver packages.
Parcel delivery has become an increasingly important part of the Postal
Service’s business as first-class mail has been on a long-running
decline. Amazon’s partnership with the U.S. Postal Service is reviewed
annually by the Postal Regulatory Commission, an oversight agency that also
sets the rates that Amazon pays for shipping. Last year, the postal service
reported a loss of $2.7 billion and revenue of $69.6 billion.
Earlier in his presidency, Trump tweeted that “Amazon is doing great
damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S.
are being hurt — many jobs being lost!” (When it comes to his own income
taxes, however, the president seems to have a different take. Not paying
federal income taxes “makes me smart,” he said during a presidential debate in
2016.) Before becoming president, Trump criticized Amazon’s “monopolistic
tendencies” and said the company could face “a huge antitrust problem” because
“Amazon is controlling so much.” The retailer, which last year had $177.9
billion in revenue, has more than half a million employees worldwide. The
company purchased Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion last year, in a deal
approved by the Federal Trade Commission.
Trump has also suggested that The Post is “a lobbyist weapon against
Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly.”
The Post’s editors and Bezos have declared that Bezos is not involved in any
journalistic decisions. The Post is owned by Bezos personally, not by Amazon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/03/29/trump-targets-amazon-in-morning-twitter-attack/?utm_term=.a09bd69c267a&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1
On Political Endorsement - A Note
From The Publisher:
(By William
Lewis, Washington Post, 25 October 2024)
The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a
presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential
election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.
As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:
“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in
the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action
in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952
election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior
to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the
campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for
his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced
us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s
Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”
The Editorial Board made two other points — ahead of an
election that John F. Kennedy won — that will resonate with readers today:
“The election of 1960 is certainly as important as any held
in this century. This newspaper is in no sense noncommittal about the
challenges that face the country. As our readers will be aware, we have
attempted to make clear in editorials our conviction that most of the time one
of the two candidates has shown a deeper understanding of the issues and a
larger capacity for leadership.”
However, it concluded:
“We nevertheless adhere to our tradition of non-endorsement
in this presidential election. We have said and will continue to say, as
reasonably and candidly as we know how, what we believe about the emerging
issues of the campaign. We have sought to arrive at our opinions as fairly as
possible, with the guidance of our own principles of independence but free of
commitment to any party or candidate.”
And again in 1972, the Editorial Board posed and then
answered this critical question ahead of an election which President Richard M.
Nixon won: “In talking about the choice of a President of the United States,
what is a newspaper’s proper role? … Our own answer is that we are, as our
masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our
support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to
bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no
reason to depart from that tradition this year.”
That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable
reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before
that, and this is what we are going back to.
We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways,
including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of
another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t
see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always
stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to
the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human
freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our
readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of
American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.
Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the
newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported
views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds. Most
of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important
country in the world is to be independent.
And that is what we are and will be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/washington-post-endorsement/
For The Post, The Wrong Choice At The
Worst Possible Time
(By
Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, 25 October 2024)
I love The Washington Post, deep in my bones. Last month
marked my 40th year of proud work for the institution, in the newsroom and in
the Opinions section. I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than
I am today, with the tragically flawed decision not to make an endorsement in
the presidential race.
At a moment when The Post should have been stepping forward
to sound the clarion call about the multiple dangers that Donald Trump poses to
the nation and the world, it has chosen instead to pull back. That is the wrong choice at the worst
possible time.
I write — I dissent — from the perspective of someone who
spent two decades as a member of The Post’s editorial board. (I stepped away
last year.) From that experience, I can say: you win some and lose some. No
one, perhaps not even the editorial page editor, agrees with every position the
board takes. At bottom, the owner of the newspaper is entitled to have an
editorial page that reflects the owner’s point of view.
In addition, let’s not overestimate the significance of
presidential endorsements. As much as we might like to believe otherwise, they
have limited persuasive value for the vanishingly small number of undecided
voters. They are distinct from endorsements for local office, involving issues
and personalities about which voters might have scant knowledge; in these
circumstances, editorial boards can serve as useful, trusted proxies. A
presidential endorsement serves a different purpose: to reflect the soul and
underlying values of the institution.
A vibrant newspaper can survive and even flourish without
making presidential endorsements; The Post itself declined to make endorsements
for many years before it began doing so regularly in 1976, as publisher and
chief executive officer William Lewis pointed out in his explanation for the decision to halt the practice. If
The Post had announced after this election that it would stop endorsing
presidential candidates, I might have disagreed with that decision, but I would
not consider it out of bounds. The practice of endorsements comes with some
costs. The newsroom and the Opinions section maintain rigorous separation, but
it is difficult to make that case to an official aggrieved by the failure to
secure an endorsement.
This is not the time to make such a shift. It is the time to
speak out, as loudly and convincingly as possible, to make the case that we
made in 2016 and again in 2020: that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold the
highest office in the land.
This was The Post on Oct. 13, 2016: “Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential
candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we
might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about
Mr. Trump,” the editorial board wrote in endorsing Hillary Clinton. Trump, it —
we because I was a member of the board then — said, “has shown himself to be
bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic,
fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored
of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation
and the world.”
Every word of that proved sadly true.
This was The Post on Sept. 28, 2020: It — we — called Trump “the worst president
of modern times,” in endorsing Joe Biden “Democracy is at risk, at home and
around the world,” the editorial warned. “The nation desperately needs a
president who will respect its public servants; stand up for the rule of law;
acknowledge Congress’s constitutional role; and work for the public good, not
his private benefit.”
What has changed since then? Trump’s behavior has only
gotten worse — and we have learned only more disturbing things about him. Most
significantly, he disputed the results of a fair election that he lost and
sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. He encouraged an insurrection
that threatened the life of his own vice president — leading to his second
impeachment — and then defended the insurrectionists as “hostages.” He will not
accept the reality of his 2020 loss or pledge to respect the results of next
month’s voting, unless it concludes in his favor.
He has threatened to “terminate” the Constitution. He has
demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “mentally impaired.” He
has vowed to fire the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against
him and “go after” his political enemies. He wants to use the military to pursue domestic opponents — “radical left lunatics”
like former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) or Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-California) — and rout out “the enemy from within.”
I could keep going but you know all this, and you get my
point: What self-respecting news organization could abandon its entrenched
practice of making presidential endorsements in the face of all this?
Lewis, in his publisher’s note, called this move “consistent
with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader:
character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule
of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” It was, he added, “a
statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on
this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the
next president.”
But asserting that doesn’t make it so. Withholding judgment
does not serve our readers — it disrespects them. And expressing our
institutional bottom line on Trump would not undermine our independence any
more than our choices did in 1976, 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008,
2012, 2016 or 2020. We were an independent newspaper then and, I hope, remain
one today.
Many friends and readers have reached out today, saying they
planned to cancel their subscriptions or had already done so. I understand, and
share, your anger. I think the best answer, for you and for me, may be embodied
in this column: You are reading it, on the same platform, in the same
newspaper, that has so gravely disappointed you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/post-editorial-board-wapo-endorsement-2024/
Post columnists respond: The paper’s refusal to endorse a
presidential candidate is a mistake.
(By 17 Post Opinions
columnists, Washington Post, 25 October 2024)
The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in
the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment
of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is
a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic
values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The
Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.
There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role
as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements,
both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs.
That has never been more true than in the current campaign. An independent
newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential
endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating
positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the
Constitution.
Karen Attiah
Perry Bacon Jr.
Matt Bai
Max Boot
Kate Cohen
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Lee Hockstader
David Ignatius
Heather Long
Ruth Marcus
Dana Milbank
Alexandra Petri
Catherine Rampell
Eugene Robinson
Jennifer Rubin
Karen Tumulty
Erik Wemple
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/post-columnist-no-endorsement-2024-trump-harris/
Readers Respond To The Post’s Decision
Not To Endorse Harris Or Trump
(By Letters
to the Editor, Washington Post, 25 October 2024)
Regarding William Lewis’s Oct. 25 op-ed, “On political endorsements”:
I’m returning to my proud tradition of not being subscribed
to The Post. There were always strong reasons for me not to subscribe, as I
don’t live in D.C. and there are comparable sources of information. But during
the Trump era, I changed this long-standing policy and paid for a subscription
so I could be fully informed about our potential descent into fascism. But it
turns out, I had it right before, and this is what I am going back to.
Mark Linnen, Lexington, Kentucky
Reading William Lewis’s explanation for why The Post will
not endorse in presidential races going forward, I was struck by this gem of
sophistry: “We see [this decision] as consistent with the values The Post has
always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in
service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for
human freedom in all its aspects.”
If that were true, The Post would live up to its ideals in
this election and grow a backbone. It is telling that at this juncture, which
many Americans consider the most important election of their lifetime, The Post
has decided to remain neutral.
Sash Goswami, Deanwood, Maryland
A disingenuous decision
Throughout the election cycle, The Post has covered things
relatively fairly. And more recently, the articles and the balance of coverage
have been more pointed about the vast differences between the candidates, which
can be nothing but helpful to people who aren’t following the news cycles as
avidly as someone like me (to my increasing despair and dread).
To then refuse to endorse one candidate over the other, in
such a stark contest, feels disingenuous. Of course I would want you to endorse
the candidate I am supporting, but not to support any candidate at all is
cowardly, because there is no way your editorial board doesn’t have a strong
opinion on the matter. And if you are going to stand behind that act of
cowardice, please be brave enough to be absolutely and unrelentingly truthful
in your coverage in the last few days before we head to the polls.
Megan Frampton, New York
If The Post was going make to the decision not to endorse in
presidential elections as a matter of principle, that choice should have been
made several months ago. This decision looks ad hoc and expedient.
Donald Trump is morally, intellectually, mentally and
emotionally unfit to serve as president. His own former chief of staff and
others in his administration attest to this.
He led a multilayered attempt to overturn the last election
despite being told repeatedly that he lost. He incited his followers to march
on the Capitol, which resulted in predictable violence.
He is 78 years old and will not release his medical records.
His policies, as incoherent as they are, would be highly
inflationary, destabilize the world and result in a country where opposition
will not be tolerated and the free press will be a fiction.
Even if The Post does not endorse, the paper can lay out
these facts clearly and bluntly — unless you really think this dangerous man is
fit.
Rita Whalen, Silver Spring
What’s an editorial board for, anyway?
The Post’s decision to no longer endorse in presidential
races is an abdication of one of the key responsibilities of newspaper
editorial boards.
This decision follows the Los Angeles Times’s refusal to
endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential race, and the New York Times’s
earlier decision to stop endorsing in New York elections. It shows that
newspaper editorial boards no longer see themselves as having a civic duty to
use their platforms to assess candidates and inform voters about the merits of
those who seek elected office.
If The Post is refusing to endorse presidential candidates,
which many rightly see as one of the most critical and visible functions of an
editorial board, why even have one?
The Post was once regarded as a publication that spoke truth
to power. Now, it is clear that it is subservient to power. This decision is a
warning to all who relied on The Post for objective and fair reporting, and on
an Editorial Board that was unafraid — and allowed — to speak out on the most
critical issues of the day, including our presidential elections.
Martin Johnson, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Why now?
If The Post wanted to make a principled decision not to
endorse a candidate, it could have announced this decision months ago. Instead,
in the final days of an election with a would-be dictator on the ballot, The
Post chooses not to endorse his opponent. It is hard to see this as anything
other than a preemptive appeasement of the worst elements of the Republican
Party.
Caitlin Smith, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate
in this year’s election is an act of pure cowardice, and to announce that
decision in this critical moment, days before the polls close, betrays the very
values that Post publisher Will Lewis purports to protect.
The Post’s editorials have made clear that Donald Trump is
an existential threat to our democracy. To consciously stand aside when the
nation needs moral and intellectual clarity undermines The Post’s expressions
of urgency. It is such a tremendous failure, on every possible level, that I
(and others, I imagine) now question the integrity of the newspaper as a whole.
You have brought ignominy to a once-proud institution.
Roger Shih, Glen Allen, Virginia
So much for press freedom
The Post won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2022 for the paper’s coverage of Jan. 6, 2021, and now you can’t
manage an endorsement for the candidate running against the perpetrator of that
attack on democracy?
Jeremy Powlus, Blandon, Pennsylvania
A non-endorsement endorsement
Readers need to have The Post’s decision on whether Donald
Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is the best candidate to be the next
president of the United States. Mr. Trump will use this lack of a
recommendation from The Post as a recommendation of him.
Dallas Odom, Livonia, Michigan
What does ‘independent’ mean?
Will Lewis explains The Post’s decision not to endorse a
presidential candidate by referring to The Post’s status as “independent.”
Setting aside the fact that he never defines this term or explains what it
means, I am confused why this ostensibly independent newspaper has elected to
endorse — in this election cycle alone — candidates in the races for Virginia’s 7th District, Maryland’s 6th District, the Senate races in both Virginia and Maryland, and the D.C. Council, among others. What about endorsing in those
races does not compromise The Post’s independence in a way that endorsing a
presidential candidate would?
Jay Willis, Seattle
A broader decline
In light of the decision not to endorse in the presidential
election, I just canceled my subscription, after being a loyal reader for more
50 years.
I am very sad to have to do this, but The Post has been
declining so much recently that this decision felt inevitable. The Post’s
leaders seem to wonder why it is struggling financially, while successive
executives have systematically destroyed the paper it once was. From the lame
right-wing editorial cartoons, to the elimination of the Outlook section, to
the departures of informative local columnists, this is no longer The Post I
loved. There just isn’t much to read in The Post anymore, and it is no longer a
local paper in any meaningful sense.
The New York Times will now be my morning read. To capitulate to Donald Trump with this
non-endorsement is the last straw.
Steve Miller, Rockville
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/washington-post-endorsement-readers-react/
If Trump Wins, Blame The New York
Times
(By
Dan Froomkin, Salon.com, 20 October 2004)
If Donald Trump wins the Nov. 5 election, the New York
Times will be partly responsible.
As the dominant voice in American journalism, the Times
could have fundamentally changed the
way Trump has been covered not just by its own journalists but by the
political media as a whole. It could have stopped using soft, empty language
and false equivalence, and made it crystal clear to the public that if elected
Trump would turn America into a racist, authoritarian regime where facts don’t
matter.
But rather than call out the dangerous lunacy in plain view,
the Times has chosen to engage in tortured euphemisms, passive construction,
and poor news judgment. Here are a few
examples of the troubling coverage — or lack thereof:
- When
Trump seized up at a rally this week and bizarrely swayed to music for 39
excruciating minutes, the Times called it an “improvisational
departure.”
- Trump’s
racist threats to deport millions of undocumented people are actually just
full of “hyperbolic
rhetoric” and “fury.”
- When
it was reported that Trump’s top general, Mark Milley, called him “fascist
to the core” the Times buried what
should have been front-page news deep in an article about something else
entirely.
- Times
journalists refuse to call Trump’s “false
claims” what they are: malicious lies.
- Hurling
racist invective at a vulnerable community to fire up a hateful and
bigoted base is just “rabble rousing” to the Times. It’s “combative
conservatism.”
- And
even in an otherwise
admirable article on Trump’s cognitive decline, the Times
couldn’t bring itself to use the term “cognitive decline.”
Meanwhile, the day-to-day coverage treats Trump like a
normal candidate, rather than as the wildly dangerous and unhinged felon
that he is. Day in and day out, the Times “sanewashes”
his dark and unintelligible ramblings. Day in and day out, it treats the
divisions about basic facts and democratic rule as just so much partisan
squabbling.
Day in and day out, Times reporters use the passive voice to
muddle responsibility for heinous acts committed by Republicans, find fault
with “both sides,” and create false equivalencies between two parties, only one
of which respects facts and the rule of law.
This weakness —- this failure to rise to the occasion – is not a
coincidence nor an accident. It is also not, despite the insistence of some on
social media, because the institution is somehow rooting for Trump.
The fault lies with the Times’ selfish, smug, and
self-destructive leadership. To be specific: New York Times publisher A.G.
Sulzberger and editor Joe Kahn have made it abundantly clear time and again
that they prize their so-called “journalistic independence” over any obligation
to sound the alarm that electing Trump would be a disaster for the country.
Rather than call out the dangerous lunacy in plain view,
the Times has chosen to engage in tortured euphemisms.
And by “journalistic independence” they don’t mean the
freedom to speak truth to power. They mean the freedom to triangulate between
the two parties to occupy some sort of mythical middle, which they consider
morally superior to “taking sides” in any kind of political battle – even one
as unbalanced as this one. Kahn gave
away the game in a recent interview
with NPR. “In people's minds, there's very little neutral middle ground,”
he said. “In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy.”
But the “people” are right about this one. There is no
middle ground between the two parties these days. And there’s certainly no
middle ground between truth and lies. Kahn’s
resistance to sounding the alarm is shared by none other than his boss, the
Times’ publisher. Sulzberger has said quite definitively that he doesn’t think
that’s something the Times should be doing. “I see no lack of passionate,
morally confident actors sounding the alarm,” Sulzberger said in
a speech this past spring. “Indeed, the alarm seems so loud and so
constant that much of the public has by now put in earplugs.”
He described independent reporting as “the kind that doesn’t
fully align with any one perspective.” It requires being “willing to take a
simple, easy, or comfortable story and complicate it with truths that people
don’t want to hear.”
I think the message that sends to the newsroom is: If
partisans are happy with your work, you’re doing something wrong, so make sure
they never are – even if the facts support their view. It’s easy to blame the
reporters whose bylines appear on Times news articles for their pusillanimity.
And I often do. But the fault actually lies further up the food chain, with
their editors and their editors’ bosses.
The way the Times covers Trump comes directly from the top –
as did the disastrous decision in 2016 to devote so much front-page real estate
to Hillary Clinton’s emails instead of to the danger represented by Trump. What we’re left with is this conclusion: If
Trump wins in part because the public was insufficiently alarmed by the press
coverage of the 2024 election, the people who run the Times will have the
extremely dubious distinction of having gotten Trump elected twice.
https://www.salon.com/2024/10/20/if-wins-the-new-york-times/
Courage & Cowardice
(By
Gene Weingarten, Substack, 26 October 2024)
Hello.
I once met Katharine Graham at an intimate dinner party
with five or six other people in her Georgetown mansion. It was early 1992 and
the presidential primary season was just beginning. On the Democratic side, the
field was still wide open; there were no obvious front-runners. Mrs. Graham sat
mostly quietly at the table, making dainty small talk. The others of us —
possibly trying to impress her; I know I surely was — discussed politics as
knowledgeably as we could. Various theories were raised as to whom the
candidate would be. There was no consensus. There was no shortage of half-baked
theories. Finally, at a break in the argument, Mrs. Graham said faintly, almost
demurely, “It will be Clinton, I think.”
She knew. Suddenly, we all knew she
knew.
Katharine Graham was a monumentally great leader. She had
the hallmark only great leaders have: When she said something, you listened
intently, not out of obeisance or fear for your job but because of respect for
the person. When she made a decision, you might agree or disagree with her, but
you never doubted, even for an instant, that the decision was made with
integrity and without self-interest. That is not something a leader can demand,
through power; it is something earned, through actions. It inevitably
accompanies commanding strength of character.
On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing The
Pentagon Papers at a time of extraordinary tension between the media and
Richard Nixon’s occultly corrupt government. The decision had been made the day
before by the only person with the power to do it: Katharine Graham. Printing
the stolen material was possibly a felony. The New York Times had just been
enjoined by a court from publishing the documents. It was not unlikely that
Nixon’s Justice Department would seek criminal penalties from The Post for
breaching that order.
During a dinner party at the same Georgetown mansion, with
the very survival of her newspaper at stake — the government wielded enormous
economic power over the media, particularly through licensing of their
broadcast affiliates — Mrs. Graham considered a few moments, then gave the
order in five two-word bites: “Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s
publish.” When her lawyers warned her that the government might come after the
editors with subpoenas for the papers, and they might face prison for refusing
to cough them up, she ordered that the documents be delivered to her house, so
she and she alone would be the one to defy the subpoena. Let them put
an old grandmother in jail, she said.
A half decade later, in the midst of the Watergate mess,
this happened: Awakened from a drunken sleep by Carl Bernstein, John Mitchell,
the former attorney general of the United States, listened to Bernstein read
the lede of yet another devastating story that would appear in the next day’s
Post. “JEEESUS!” Mitchell screamed. “Katie Graham is gonna get her tit caught
in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” The story was published, of course,
and for years afterward, Mrs. Graham wore a specially-made necklace with two
charms on it: A tit and a wringer.
My God, Katharine Graham had one hell of a pair of ovaries.
On July 17, 2001, when Mrs. Graham died after a fall on the
street, her employees walked the halls of the Washington Post building,
tearful.
Jeff Bezos has earned billions in his life, but he will
never earn that.
—
The staff at The Post, today, is shocked and angry and
demoralized. You know why. This nation is facing a decision so critical that
its survival as a democracy may well be at stake. Obviously, people are
confused: Otherwise, the polls would not be even. Guidance can help.
The purpose of an editorial department of a newspaper is to
write opinion pieces — sometimes op-eds, and sometimes editorials, which carry
no byline but represent the imprimatur of the newspaper itself. You may feel
these are silly or inappropriate or a vestigial remnant of an earlier, simpler
time in journalism. But the fact is that a large staff of hard working,
knowledgeable people are employed to do this, and they treat their job
seriously. Editorials have, indeed, moved public opinion. Brilliant editorials
— such as those during the Civil Rights movement, written in defiance of
literal threats of death — have helped change history. It takes real courage to
speak the truth to power.
Yesterday, The Washington Post, at the direction of its
owner Jeff Bezos, showed shocking institutional cowardice. It declined to support a candidate
in the upcoming election which is — let’s be blunt — between good and evil.
Bezos almost certainly ordered it because he was intimidated by the threats
posed to his financial empire by the vengeance threatened by Donald Trump, a
man who aims to dismantle the will of the people. Bezos did not want to incur
Trump’s wrath.
In his statement, publisher William Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch
protege, lied nakedly about what had happened, and why. He said the newspaper
made its choice in order to “return to their roots”, to re-set itself to a
prior, better, more genteel time when The Post declined to endorse presidential
candidates.
If you think that’s even remotely true, you are the idiot he
takes you for.
—
There is such a thing as moral authority. It may be
intangible, but it is there, and it can be powerful. It is essential to
newspaper opinion writing. The Washington Post owner flushed it down the toilet
yesterday. What is left is invertebrate.
This action has damaged everyone, not the least of whom are
the dedicated, talented employees of The Post, whose careers are likely now
diminished because, well, do they work for a great newspaper, anymore? They are
like homeowners whose neighborhood suddenly gets a pig slaughterhouse. All the
home values are diminished.
In the one or two days before the election, expect to read a
banal, obligatory piece in the Post — most newspapers do it — urging everyone
to vote, for the sake of civic responsibility. Why should you believe it from
The Post, now? The hypocrisy is thick. This is a newspaper that looked at the
stark, existential choice facing the country, with the people in fear, and
decided to sit this one out. They’re not voting. Why should you?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150741708?source=queue&autoPlay=false
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