My Reaction: Three Cheers for Jeff Bezos Josh Marshall August 5, 2013, 8:48 PM
I’ll say it: let’s celebrate Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post.
Before going further let me acknowledge the potential downsides. Bezos is an outside buyer with no history in the news or newspaper business, something he readily acknowledges. More potentially worrisome, he’s the primary owner and CEO of Amazon, a company with deep stakes in numerous critical policy debates ranging from state sales tax policy, union organizing, worker rights and wages, the book and entertainment businesses, telecom, international trade, not to mention its unimaginably large footprint in the Internet cloud.
We’ll have to watch and wait to see how the new Post covers this multitude of issues in which its owner has a direct financial interest.
That said, for years the Post was effectively subsidized by the parent company’s ownership of Kaplan test prep, which gave the Graham family and the whole paper a huge stake in the rather dubious for-profit education business. So the kind of very rich people who can afford to own major metro newspapers tend to have other irons in the fire which potentially compromise their paper’s reporting. It kind of goes with the territory. It’s also worth noting that the Post was a family-dominated rather than a family owned paper; it’s actually a public corporation, a fact which has loomed large in its recent struggles.
If the Bezos Post doesn’t run pieces on Amazon’s sweat shop-like warehouses or monopolistic practices, the brand will become a joke and the paper will die. Could happen. We’ll simply have to wait and see.
Finally, Amazon, as much as I (as a book reader) and this company (as a user of the Amazon ‘cloud’) use it, is basically the poster boy for the low-wage, faster, faster, faster economy which is doing so much to create the economically polarized society so many of us lament. This is a big part of Alec MacGillis’s beef in this quick write up he did on the sale at The New Republic.
So with all that, here are three reasons why I think this is a good thing.
First, as we all know, the news industry (calling it ‘newspapers’ at this point is a misnomer since none of these outfits are primarily focused on paper anymore) is going through a period of massive disruption - to the editorial product and the business model which once undergirded it. The idea that papers can or should make massive profits, enough to enrich shareholders and hold on to brigades of reporters, many of whom worked at an almost academic pace, was never the natural order of things even though two or three generations of people came to think it was. It was a reality created in the early-mid-20th century when numerous city’s became single or two paper towns. That fact allowed those papers to force what amounted to monopoly rents on all commercial communication in their given domain. It was, as they say, good business if you could get it.
That’s over. Not because we’re in decline as a civilization, or financialization or because of whatever malefactor you want to point to but because the monopoly element is gone. That fact, along with the over-supply of publications, defines today’s news economy.
To survive, massive change and experimentation are necessary. And you’re simply not going to get that without owners who can make big, big, big upfront investments to fund those kinds of changes. It just won’t happen with ownership that’s running break even at best and keeping laser like focus on the near-term bottom line. A key calculation behind the sale, according to Ezra Klein, was that Don Graham saw that to survive the paper would have to keep cutting. Whatever change, experimentation or anything else you might think the Post needs, Bezos has, in practical terms, an infinite amount of money.
Second, especially in this period of flux (and there are good reasons to think, always) newspapers should be owned by people and/or families as opposed to publicly traded companies or private equity sharks. We saw what a pump and dump villain did in just a few years to all but destroy great papers like the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune.
‘Newspapers’ (I think the word needs quotes) need personality, they need accountability and while they need to make a profit they can’t exist solely to make a profit. That makes personal ownership very important, even though it opens the door to all sorts of problematic idiosyncrasies and meddling.
Sally Quinn, weirdly, said tonight that this is the end of the family owned newspaper era. But my understanding is that Bezos is a person and presumably has a family. So I’d say it’s something like a rebirth of the family-owned era rather than its demise. Given his massive wealth, it’s hardly credible that Bezos purchased the Post to burnish his personal bottom line. Whatever his goals may be, he bought it because he wants to be the owner of a major newspaper.
Finally, we live in an era that many compare to the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century. New industries created almost unimaginably large fortunes, labor was enfeebled, wages kept low (though prices too in many cases), monopoly power was unchecked and entrenched wealth owned politicians in a way that would shock us even today. And yet, a good chunk of that wealth was later poured into the arts, education and philanthropies of various sorts. To pick just one of the more notable examples, Andrew Carnegie, one of the three or four archetypal Gilded Age figures eventually funded the creation of over 2500 libraries, most of them in the US and many still servicing local communities, albeit with diminished hours, in small towns across the country.
What Bezos is doing isn’t philanthropy. He’s buying a for profit company and presumably aims to run it as a profit. But from a broader vantage point, it represents one of our Gilded Age robber barons taking his ample wealth and directing toward what is something like a public trust. I think that’s a good thing. In that sense, I think it’s similar, though not quite as altruistic and on nothing like the scale of what Bill Gates is doing with his vast fortune, investing in generally unglamorous projects that have immense impact in human terms for people around the world.
So, press organizations, particularly ‘newspapers’ should be owned by people, real people, not diversified corporations or highly leveraged Wall Street creations. Bezos has plenty of money to experiment and lots of experimentation is required. At this juncture, nostalgia is a greater danger to institutions like the Post and the entire industry than the real but I hope overblown perils of Bezos ownership. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/08/ill_say_it_lets_celebrate.php?m=1
Amazon Founder Says He Clicked on Washington Post by Mistake
Posted by Andy Borowitz August 6, 2013
SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, told reporters today that his reported purchase of the Washington Post was a “gigantic mix-up,” explaining that he had clicked on the newspaper by mistake.
“I guess I was just kind of browsing through their website and not paying close attention to what I was doing,” he said. “No way did I intend to buy anything.”
Mr. Bezos said he had been oblivious to his online shopping error until earlier today, when he saw an unusual charge for two hundred and fifty million dollars on his American Express statement.
After investigating with the credit-card company, he was informed that he had been charged for the purchase price of the entire Washington Post, which, he said, was “pure craziness.”
“No way in hell would I buy the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t even read the Washington Post.”
Mr. Bezos said he had been on the phone with the Post’s customer service for the better part of the day trying to unwind his mistaken purchase, but so far “they’ve really been giving me the runaround.”
According to Mr. Bezos, “I keep telling them, I don’t know how it got in my cart. I don’t want it. It’s like they’re making it impossible to return it.”
When I first heard that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was a libertarian, I laughed out loud, because I thought it was a joke. Bezos’s company, after all, is based on the Internet, which was created during the Cold War by a military research-and-development arm of the federal government, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. No Arpanet, no Internet. No Internet, no Amazon, no $25 billion personal fortune for Jeff Bezos.
Why am I writing about Bezos now? For exactly the reason you might suspect: because of his pending purchase of The Washington Post. Call me naive, if you like, but I think that if you’re going to own a high-class journalistic enterprise like The Post, whose job is to call powerful forces to account, you should expect to be called to account yourself.
But good luck trying to get that done when it comes to Bezos.
When I exposed the thesis of this column to Amazon, I couldn’t even get a response, much less an interview.
If you check the numerous articles about Bezos — including Fortune’s 2012 businessperson-of-the-year story and the interviews that he’s done — you see that he ducks and weaves when he’s asked about libertarianism. But consider this anecdote, courtesy of Sheldon Kaphan, formerly Amazon’s chief technology officer, and Bezos’s first hire at the firm.
Kaphan says he once heard Bezos say, “If the government hadn’t invented the Internet, private enterprise would have done it.” Yeah, right, and defeated the Soviet Union, too.
Look. As long as Bezos was doing nothing but running Amazon, there wasn’t much reason for people to care about his politics. I certainly didn’t care about them. But when you’re about to become a major force in the political life of Washington by buying a diminished but still immensely powerful outlet like The Post, that’s a different story.
No matter what Bezos says now, once his purchase of The Post closes, scheduled for the fall, he’s almost certain to begin imposing his standards and beliefs on The Post, or at least on its opinion pages.
For better or worse, that’s what newspaper owners do — but I’d at least like to hear from Bezos what his beliefs are and to have him reconcile the question of his being a libertarian who’s benefited immensely from taxpayers’ R&D money. A core belief of libertarianism is that ideas will prevail in a free marketplace. And if you know about markets, you know the key to making them efficient and fair is for as many players to have as much information as possible.
Finally, I can’t forget what happened after Rupert Murdoch bought the then-upscale New York Post from its liberal owner, Dorothy Schiff, in 1976. Murdoch assured the paper’s staff that he’d retain the Post’s essential character as a serious newspaper. And we all know how that turned out.
Disclosure: I am a retiree of and own stock in The Washington Post Co., and The Post pays Fortune for the right to run my work.
Sloan is Fortune magazine’s senior editor at large.
The Graham family's sale of The Washington Post to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has prompted intense discussion of the future of journalism. That discussion has yet to focus on a remarkable feature of the Post and other old-fashioned newspapers: They provide people with a great deal of content that they wouldn't have chosen in advance.
Newspapers create what we might call an architecture of serendipity, in which readers encounter all sorts of stories, facts, ideas and opinions that they didn't select. Much of what they encounter seems boring, irritating, wrong or offensive, but on occasion it turns out to be surprising, delightful, alarming, important and even life-changing.
A lot can be said on behalf of serendipity. In your daily newspaper, you might learn about a new book — on neuroscience, say, or folk music — and, to your great surprise, it might pique your interest and broaden your horizons. You might run into a story on how to improve your health or save for retirement, and it might lead you to alter your habits, even if you don't much like thinking about your health or your retirement.
You might see a story on Syria, and it might move you, maybe even alter your life, even though you couldn't have imagined yourself being interested in Syria. Well-run newspapers offer stories that intrigue, entertain and affect readers who come across those stories only by happenstance, not because they ordered them in advance.
Desiring serendipity
An architecture of serendipity seems old-fashioned today, an artifact of the technological limitations of a bygone era. The wave of the future is an architecture of control, through which consumers get to see, read and hear exactly what they want and avoid what they don't want. Modern technologies make it easy for providers of goods and services to engage in personalization, which means they can tailor their products to people's specific tastes.
Bezos has mastered this point. Amazon learns what you like, and it makes recommendations for you based on what you like. Those recommendations can be eerily good. In 1998, Bezos made the point explicitly (and to The Washington Post, no less): "If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn't have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores."
Can't the same be said of newspapers? If the Post has 19 million readers, could it have 19 million newspapers? In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, a technology specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prophesied the emergence of the Daily Me — a newspaper in which each person selected the stories that he wanted and screened out those that he didn't.
In the newspaper business, complete personalization hasn't yet arrived, but it may be on its way. For example, Facebook has created a news feed, with a secret algorithm, that uses your previous clicks to make selections for you. Mark Zuckerberg has said that the feed will operate as a "personalized newspaper." Then there's News360, an application that monitors what you choose to read and, "by learning what you enjoy, brings you content that you'll find interesting and important."
If he wishes, Bezos could easily take The Washington Post in this direction. A redesigned website, or an app, might create headlines and sort stories, ideas and opinions on the basis of people's previous choices. If you are bored by politics, or if new science fiction movies are what most interest you, then Your Post could be set up accordingly. Why shouldn't people see what they want?
The best answer is that in communications, as in daily life, serendipity is highly desirable — an important part of freedom and self-government, not an obstacle to them. Those who read only what they identify in advance end up narrowing their horizons; they may create echo chambers of their own design.
Social glue
This is a social problem, not merely an individual one. When like-minded people speak only with one another, they tend to go to extremes, thus aggravating political polarization. An architecture of serendipity can reduce that effect. It can also create a kind of social glue, by creating common understandings and experiences for members of a highly diverse nation.
It is ironic that old-fashioned newspapers served some of their most important social functions only because of technological limitations, which prevented them from giving their customers only what they want. Those limitations are a thing of the past. In 20 years, daily newspapers, including The Washington Post, will likely look a lot different from how they look today. Whatever their emerging form, it is critical, for individuals and societies alike, that they continue to provide readers with the experience of serendipity.
Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is the former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and author of "Simpler: The Future of Government [ http://www.amazon.com/Simpler-Government-Cass-R-Sunstein/dp/1476726590 ]."
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