The News
Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post heralded a new era of closer attention to customer service and data analytics.
The Post sped up page loads, built a slick subscription funnel, and hung giant data screens in the newsroom. They even started publishing “BuzzFeed meets Woodward and Bernstein” stories like “15 awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015.” Bloomberg noted in 2016 that “Bezos has been hands-on with its technology and instrumental in making it a more data-driven company.”
Last week, the Post received what was probably the clearest signal in the history of newsroom analytics. Some 250,000 subscribers — 10% of the total, an unheard of wave in digital media — canceled after Bezos spiked a Kamala Harris endorsement.
In this article:
Ben’s view
I can’t believe I’m writing about The Washington Post again. But the gap between its conduct and its self-image — on so many different fronts — offer an X-ray into the challenges of the media business right now. Anyway, it beats staring at polling data.
And one of the big questions is: How do you square the data-centric buzzwords that Bezos imported from Amazon’s grinding, low-margin, and brilliant eCommerce business to the strange and antiquated trade of news publishing?
One path is to take the data seriously. It’s not too late for the Post to reverse course.
“We’ve listened to our staff, and our readers,” Bezos or the Post’s publisher William Lewis could write. They could publish the endorsement that the analytics demand. (The most craven, and funniest, possible scenario: Harris wins next Tuesday, and on November 15 Bezos announces he has looked at the analytics and listened to his customers, reverses course and proudly endorses the president-elect.)
The other is to do what Bezos did in his beautifully articulated — give that crisis comms team a raise! — essay on the role of journalism, and to willfully ignore the data. The essay focuses on capital-J Journalism, trust, credibility, and values. It argues, accurately in my view, that endorsements — particularly in digital products that lack the old distinctions between news and opinion, or an audience familiar with them — muddy the brand. They always did, of course, but they gave publishers political power that paid back in other ways. Now they damage the brand without giving the publisher any real juice, so what’s the point?
His essay was curiously totally lacking any mention of data or analytics, save one: “It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.” It’s a silly point, one you could also make, I suppose, about the regional retailers displaced by Amazon. The basic cause of the shift is the internet.
But if you took it seriously, how would you follow the data into that one? If you actually wanted to dominate Washington, DC (which probably, sadly, wouldn’t pay) you could look at more data, like the 2020 election results in a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden in 2020. You’d probably publish some mix of strident liberal politics and swarming local lifestyle and service coverage. I don’t think anyone is suggesting the Post head that way.
The Bezos Post likes to see itself as data driven. And of course good modern newsrooms are obsessed with understanding their audiences. But the news business — as Bezos, himself, obviously sees — has never succeeded by following the data to its logical conclusion. There’s a reason Bezos bought The Washington Post rather than Yahoo!, and a reason the Sulzberger family has run circles around one of history’s most brilliant American entrepreneurs. It’s not because they’re better at math. It’s because they know who they are.
Room for Disagreement
Most observers, and most of the Post’s newsroom, have taken a basically cynical view of Bezos’ conversion to a profound belief in the neutrality of news in the final days before an election that could put his commercial interests at risk. That’s partly because much of his class of billionaires has made the same pivot in the same time period. Bezos acknowledges this, and writes that he “sighed” when he learned an executive at his space company Blue Origin just met Trump. And friends say that his beliefs are sincerely held.
“I know he was troubled that his decision was misunderstood – and I thought he wrote an excellent response,” IAC Chairman Barry Diller told me in an email.