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June 5, 2024 - 7:30pm
Sally Buzbee, once heralded as the first woman to lead the Washington Post, is out of a job. Hired with the enthusiastic blessing of owner Jeff Bezos in 2021, Buzbee oversaw the paper’s continued decline of more than 50% of its audience since 2020. Just last year, the Post‘s deficit hit $77 million, and 700 employees were offered buyouts in October.
Now CEO William Lewis stands accused by his own reporters of sidelining diversity, as though doubling down on elite Leftism will somehow rescue the paper. The issue is that it can’t sustain the overhead of a publication like the Post, unless Bezos is willing to fund the company purely as a charity. But the delusion at the heart of this dilemma, that readers crave warmed-up over-ideological pablum peddled with the pretence of “neutrality”, is also what pushes consumers away.
Buzbee reportedly stepped down to avoid a restructuring that put her in a new role. Matt Murray, a three-decade Wall Street Journal veteran, will replace Buzbee until “low-key British newshound” Robert Winnett steps into the job after election day. David Shipley will stay on as editorial page editor.
In a Monday meeting, the Post reported that Lewis was “grilled by reporters” on the race and sex of Buzbee’s successors. “The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post,” said one member of the staff. “And we now have four white men running three newsrooms.”
Flashing back to Buzbee’s hiring in 2021 is somewhat amusing in this context. “We looked carefully for someone who shares our values of diversity and inclusion, and who is committed to prioritising them in our news coverage as well as our hiring and promotion,” Fred Ryan boasted at the time. Vanity Fair marked the occasion with a photoshoot.
But Buzbee’s staff was far from picture-perfect. One company-wide email referred to the paper as a “toxic work environment” amid racial and sexual strife in 2022. On top of that, high-profile reporter Taylor Lorenz repeatedly stoked public feuds with her own employer.
Now, media critic Jack Shafer describes Bezos’s new hires as the “Murdoch-ization” of the Post, though he cautions that “none of the Lewis crew seem to tilt” towards “fiery Right-wing” fare. When it comes to the Journal, Murdoch himself “merely changed the paper into a tighter read, and edited it more for a general audience than a pure business one,” Shafer argues.
There’s a snobbishness in American mass media that keeps prestige newsrooms in internet-era doom spirals. Indeed, Lewis himself told frustrated Post employees this week: “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Papers are thus seeking out managers with paywall experience. But, according to Sara Fischer of Axios, “that often comes at the expense of diversity, and in many cases includes a focus on British talent.” In addition to the Post, Fisher noted “the newsroom leaders of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News are currently all British, hailing from News Corp titles and the Economist.”
Beltway denizens like Buzbee are not interested in truly cracking down on the anti-audience journalism of writers such as Lorenz, who mistake the preferences of their niche social circles for those of news consumers as a whole. This error is worse for business than ever before because the competition from independent media means readers and listeners can go elsewhere, often for less money and often with less contempt for their ideological differences.
Dispensing with identity politics takes more self-awareness and more courage than most successful journalists are able to muster — at least stateside, where reporters at failing papers still pine for more empty gestures at “diversity”.
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SubscribeThe article touches on something that I’ve wondered about in the last few years. How can media companies, film studios, newspapers and the like continue ad infinitum shedding their audiences and losing ever more money without seemingly caring about it at all?
In this example it’s the WP and Bezos who might point to an answer. Have we moved on from consumers and advertisers being the main source of revenue? Are we now in an era where megacorps and billionaires can afford to keep bankrolling loss-making media indefinitely as long as they are pushing their agenda? Does Hollywood not give a fig about releasing flop after flop because it gets film funding from the likes of Blackrock and Vanguard that dwarfs audience receipts?
I don’t know. Maybe too conspiratorial. But it could explain why viewer/reader/audience numbers don’t seem to matter any more.
It’s not even really about pushing their agenda so much as the prestige of being “the guy who still publishes ‘serious’ journalism” Of course, they reflexively define “serious journalism” as left-wing print journalism; it would never occur to them that right-wing journalism, or online journalism, could be anything other than partisan schlock.
Jeff Bezos has $200 billion. He can afford to throw away $77 million a year on a pet project like the Post. What else is going to do with his money?
He could give it to me. I won’t say no.
Please, let’s form an orderly queue. And I was there before you!
😉
That’s exactly right. Which is why the issue was with the ‘halving of the audience’ rather than with the ‘losing money’. Bezos doesn’t care about burning 77 million a year.
But he does care about losing readership and influence – because that’s exactly what he is trying to buy with his money.
I think we can be confident that whatever Bezos thinks he is doing with the money, he does not see it as being thrown away. The OP is making a valuable point: perhaps the West is now so corporatist that it makes more sense to make propaganda than to make news and entertainment content that consumers themselves want to pay for.
There was a good article somewhere explaining this as an artifact of cheap funding from the COVID era. I would combined this with earlier credit easing: the long period of zero interest rates. This period created many new unicorns some times in clearly broken business models (think WeWork). It looks like it also funded a broken media model – at least during COVID easing with tech giants entering the media business (e.g. Amazon and Apple). As the interest rates go up, cheap money dries up and creative destruction begins.
This is all connected with the nudge and propaganda ideas that the media controls the opinions of the people, so if you control the media you can push opinion in any direction you want it to go and people will follow like sheep.
It turns out that while it might be true for some people, possibly particularly those with a high trust of institutions, but a sizeable portion of the population have opinions first, and then choose media that aligns with their world view, or view the world more skeptically when real world experience doesn’t coincide with the views they are being told to believe. The learnt reality is that media doesn’t have as much control as theory says, and gets rejected if it tries to push its audience to places they don’t want to go.
When your main aim is propagandising no amount of money thrown into the pit is too great. Remember that in 2012 the U.S government removed restrictions on propagandising against U.S citizens through the Smith-Mundt Modernisation Act.
I feel that this is the case with The Guardian.
Whatever else you may say about the Washington Post, it made Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, and John Philip Sousa’s careers.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when a human becomes a zombie
You can only detect it in retrospect, after all the biting.
There’s a reason American publications are bringing in Brits – they are much less ideological. As bad as the media ecosystem feels in Britain right now, it is infinitely better than the U.S., or anywhere else in the world that I know of. You might not like the Daily Mail for many reasons, but it actually has balance in its news coverage. Same thing with the Telegraph.
PS. Why in the world can these publications simply not fire disgruntled employees? This used to actually happen.
Unions.
Unions can prevent general firings, but they can’t prevent redundancies. And they are coming.
Seeing a journalist from a large English-language newspaper from afar, you can unmistakably say that you see an idiot.
.
I don’t want to brag, but when my young startup colleague many years ago proudly told me that he was being hired by Google, I sadly answered him: “Why are you, a good programmer, going to this cesspool?” He didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand myself; my reaction was purely instinctive. There is always a cadaverous smell in the giant office.
All I can say is this is enjoyable to watch. I genuinely hope progressives get every single thing they have wished for.
This article made my day!
Why not make reading Wash Post compulsory? Not only reading but mandatory discussion in faculty rooms, for instance. Did Pravda go bankrupt? No! Izvestia neither! This was because we had the dictatorship of the proletariat and everyone had to know their duties to the society. Not sure who’s going to enforce this however if we eventually make up our minds to defund the police.
What a great comment! Thank you for the good laugh 🙂
As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I appreciate your post enormously – not least because so many things now are painfully reminiscent of what I remember from those times.
I’m not one of those tedious people who keep harping on about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but I do have to wonder how minimum wage warehouse workers – whose every move is subject to a hard analysis on the effect it has on Amazon’s bottom line – would feel about the idea that Jeff Bezos seems to have willingly funded a news organisation that’s has been haemorrhaging millions of dollars for several years, all because its employees would rather worry about identity politics than actually giving its customers what they want.
“People are not reading your stuff.”
That’s all that needs to be said.
It’s superficially satisfying to watch these pillocks self-immolate, but the loss of real journalism will make the world a worse place unfortunately.
As an aside, can anyone explain the paradox by which the “progressives”, whose worldview is in one sense so far beyond that of most people (note: not better), simultaneously seem to be a few years out of date? Masks, BLM & trans stuff are so 2020.
Are they progressives or are they Liberation Theologians?
I used to read the Washington Post back in the day. I miss it. Of course the paper today is not the same.
Ah. Taylor Lorenz, the “reporter” who proudly attended the Pornhub Awards and posted it all over Twitter. Pornhub – the despicable site that is responsible for leaving human sex trafficking videos up on its website because they “don’t have enough moderators” .
As an American, I have been a Washington Post subscriber for decades, but it is now an absurdly leftist propaganda outlet. And the comment section is where sanity goes to die.
The WP comment section is completely overrun by communist wackos. And any attempt to make a conservative comment gets you a time-out.
I suspect that the Washington Post comments section has been taken over by a small, dedicated (unrepresentative) group of Leftists who spend countless hours spewing bile.
‘Papers are thus seeking out managers with paywall experience’
What does that mean?
How to monetize online news so that most articles require a subscription to access.
Well to be fair I get the feeling the have created a very diverse group of people who are no longer buying the paper, so that must be some sort of result isn’t it ?
In a Monday meeting, the Post reported that Lewis was “grilled by reporters” on the race and sex of Buzbee’s successors.
These people just don’t get it and they never will until and unless they are the ones trying to make a payroll. Their vision DOES NOT WORK, no matter how many slogans or how much branding is tried out. In the end, products survive on quality. Or perceived quality. The business of newspapers is right in the name; there is no mystery involved. When circulation or sales or whatever other metric falls, the CEO is the first one affected regardless of race or sex.
WaPo’s diversity-first approach played out as anyone with a shred of intelligence could have predicted. When a business is prioritizing immutable characteristics over product quality, the outcome is pre-ordained. But the staff does not want to hear it. These people do not want to hear that their religion does not work. It is not practical. It may be a useful means to something, but it is never, ever an end. On the other hand, stories like this do make me smile.
Tom Wolfe’s “Great Re-Learning” may finally be reaching America’s ridiculous newsrooms. “People aren’t reading your stuff.”
At some point you run out of other people’s money. LOL
The enthusiasm of black socialists to sack, destroy, and annihilate anything built by white people is unlimited.
Lewis himself told frustrated Post employees this week: “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Whew! Do you feel the burn!
Full disclosure: I have cancelled my subscription, and it will take effect in a few days. I promise I won’t be back. I belong to one of the most hated and vilified minorities in America. I am a moderate and I’m consistently, and equally hated by both the left and right.
I admit the left has better educated haters, and they are much more vile. The troglodytes on the right have much less imagination and their vocabulary is childish. That said, your paper (see how old I am) is doomed. Your mouthpiece for greed head capitalism coupled with socialist rhetoric has finally killed the benefits vs the detriments.
The “left” does not have better educated haters. Using big words does not equal intelligence. I have seen simple ideas communicated in long paragraphs and with words of 4-6 syllables, a mishmash of ideas with no connecting points, that used buzzwords, filler-words, and the popular slang of the day. The writer was still dumb, however.