Notes On The Bezos Debacle At The Washington Post

A tech mogul obsessed with customers disappoints the newspaper's subscribers. Oversight or typical billionaire move?

Let’s talk about Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder is currently at the center of a firestorm at the Washington Post, where more than 250,000 subscribers have canceled since the paper declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time since the 1980s. That’s 10% of Post subscribers, gone in a blink.

As the crisis at the newspapers worsens, here are my notes on what it means for Bezos, and for journalism:

Jeff Bezos, a man known for customer obsession at Amazon, didn’t know his customers at the Washington Post. For years, the newspaper marketed itself as a counterweight to Trump, using the oft-debated ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ tagline. The positioning brought in many paying readers, per Semafor. These were Bezos’s customers, and when he shelved the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement at the last minute, he didn’t deliver for them. It was unusual for Bezos, who was either so removed from the paper’s operations he didn’t anticipate the customer reaction, or finally wanted use the influence he bought for the Post’s $250 million price tag. Either way, the decision — a one-way door as Bezos would out it — has already cost the paper more than $10 million in annual subscriber revenue.

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Bezos hasn’t turned the Washington Post around yet, so there’s also a possibility that he deliberately broke from his existing customers to avoid mediocrity, fight so-called ‘audience capture,’ and set a new path forward. What that new path might be? Still undetermined.

The timing of the Posts’s non-endorsement was bad, but the idea wasn’t awful. Bezos made a compelling point in a note to readers that newspapers’ endorsements make the public think they have a rooting interest. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias,” Bezos wrote. “Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” He’s not wrong. Journalists often complain that editorial boards harm their credibility. These boards pop off on topics they know tangentially as reporters exhaust themselves to unearth the facts. I’ve long felt that endorsing candidates undermined the credibility of newspapers. Report the news and let the readers decide.

But… the timing. Killing an endorsement after your editorial board has already written it, as reportedly happened at the Post, is unacceptable. It undermines the perception that your newspaper operates independently of its billionaire owner. The move harms the paper’s credibility, and Bezos should’ve anticipated that.

Bezos seems to care about journalism. But he hasn’t sat for an interview with a journalist in years. It’s one of the weirdest things about the man. A newspaper owner with little interest in engaging the press.

Many thought Bezos was a gift to journalism and believed he’d stay hands off forever, keeping the Washington Post as a legacy project. That was too optimistic. Remember, Bezos is one of the most cutthroat businessmen that ever lived, someone with real economic interests in Washington. To think he’d never wield his power when pressed was naive. And now, he has done so.

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© 2024 Alex Kantrowitz
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