I have some fairly simple advice for Jeff Bezos. Fire all of upper management and the entire editorial board and all its contributors. Keep your bloggers, since they are providing the best opinion content that the Washington Post produces, but get rid of Krauthammer and Will and Ignatius and Cohen and Thiessen and Gerson and Parker. Don’t even stop with the right-wing hacks. Let Eugene Robinson and Colbert King and E.J. Dionne find new work, too. Just clean house.
What you need is intelligence, freshness, energy, and (most of all) irreverence. If you follow my advice, you will absolutely appall Washington society, which will cause them to read your paper more religiously than they have ever read it before. The best writing about Washington has always been done by people who don’t spend much time there and don’t give a shit about hurt feelings, access to sources, or invitations to the next big happening in town. The problem with the Post is that everyone who works there seems afraid to label the elites of Washington as the shit-heels that they are. Anything that might hurt Sally Quinn’s feelings is muted. Everyone has to pretend that David Broder isn’t (wasn’t) a senile gas-bag. Enough!
The only good moment the press has had in DC in the last decade was when, at the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years ago, Stephen Colbert held up a mirror to their faces and they were forced to recoil in horror.
Off with all their careers!
And honesty. If you discover that a columnist is consistently dishonest, stop publishing them. If this means that you can’t find a right-leaning columnist to publish, so be it. Make your creed “no bullshit.” Tell your editors that you’ll be calling them for an explanation if you find one obviously bad-faith distortion of fact in any columns. Don’t facilitate the spin-wars in any way. If you discover that reality has a strong left-wing bias, don’t worry about it. The more the right hates you, the more they’ll link to your articles.
Go young. Young people know how to use the internet and their worldview is by definition the cutting edge. Anyone old enough to vote when the Iraq War started who wasn’t calling bullshit should be suspect. Anyone complicit in any way with the Bush administration should be gone. Start over. Fresh.
Come in and take a dump on everyone and everything. Your papers will sell like hotcakes and you’ll be doing something truly patriotic.
Also, buy CNN and follow the same recipe.
All good advice.
Except he is described as a Libertarian, and probably bought the post so he could be the host of socially acceptable cocktail parties.
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And I bet he loves Krauthammer and Will.
.
W00T!
I’ll have some of what you’re smoking, Boo!
he’s a little more complicated than that. He has given over 2 million dollars to pro-marriage equality groups, and mostly donates to Democrats.
What Democrats besides Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray? Those two are his home-state Senators after all.
I would say his donations represent strategic choices rather than his true political leanings. we’ll find out what those are shortly…
I don’t know. Why does a citizen of Washington state give to Conyers and Leahy?
Oh, right. They were (are) the chairmen of the Judiciary Committees.
Still…
Ha. Politico’s bizzaro twin. Thanks, that was as insightful a critique of East Coast journalism as I expect to read for a while.
Hopefully your advice will be paid advice soon…
yeah, right.
I happen to like Eugene’s insightful articles as well as EJ Dionne. Cleaning house would not be a bad idea but don’t throw highly experienced and knowledgeable people out. Someone has to be left to run that paper.
Totally agree with this, also Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent (as well as a bunch of the other people attached to their blogs, Jonathon Bernstein for one). The rest can all go though.
He said to keep the bloggers. I suppose that means Rubin? Lol
Yeah, until she tells a lie.
I love Eugene Robinson and have enormous respect for Dionne, but it’s best to just attack the culture rather than the ideology. Cleaning house is better politically than keeping a couple of liberals while canning all the conservatives.
Both ER and Dionne are soft, polite Establishment-protecting center-left types who rarely rock the boat and generally go along with the CW. ER in particular I’ve always seen as no more than a whichever-way-the-wind-blows CW spouter. This from seeing him hundreds of times on cable, wasting band width mostly with his say-nothing-controversial style, while usually agreeing amiably with people like Morning Joe. Nothing there that has ever tempted me to become a regular reader of his column.
Ditto Dionne for the most part, though he occasionally offers a thoughtful, deeper dissent from the usual mainstream pablum — just not often enough to justify keeping him on. Dump him too. Too polite also, especially to the people he refers to as his “friends on the Right.” No, these wackaloon extremists of the GOP are not people any principled person of the Left should consider “friends”.
I’d prefer not only someone younger and fresher, but edgier and more irreverent and independent-minded. Open minded too, and fearless about ruffling feathers. I like that guy at HuffPo — David Bromwich. Joe Conason is still around I think. DItto Gene Lyons.
Ok, those guys I recc’d aren’t really younger, but at least they offer an intelligent, fresh perspective, usually from solid reporting and investigating or giving a topic serious thought.
I’m just not up on younger voices other than Matt Taibbi or Sam Stein. Some of the better ones have blogs which tend to be too narrow and nichey and so wouldn’t be a good fit for the broader audience a regular newspaper columnist tries to reach.
What?
Get rid of the columnists?
Especially the Reich-wing ones?
Then the WaPo will have change Fred Hiatt’s motto:
“All the news the print to fit” – that days Reich-Wing talking points and memes.
Best advice of all for anypublisher. It works both ways too, don’t allow dishonest Left-wing spin doctors and sycophants either.
How about a close to zero tolerance for dishonesty instead of the low bar of “consistently dishonest?” Like Howard Kurtz that lived at WAPO for many years before moving over to The Daily Beast until Tina Brown:
8/5/2013 tweet from Tina.
Right on target. Which is why it is unlikely to occur.
And the CNN advice. Also on target.
But is Bezos interested in making money or moving politics? That is, isn’t this move likely to be more of a Richard Mellon Scaife sort of move in which he is buying a mouthpiece.
That is, isn’t this move likely to be more of a Richard Mellon Scaife sort of move in which he is buying a mouthpiece.
Bingo!!
From what I understand Jeff Bezos is an anti-worker rich boy with some libertarian leanings (though not hard core). While this is a better outcome than, say, the Koch brothers buying the paper, I am not optimistic.
From what I understand Jeff Bezos is an anti-worker rich boy with some libertarian leanings (though not hard core).
Obvious for a guy who bootstrapped it by getting a $300,000 loan from his parents to start Amazon, right?
Amazon is an incredibly smart, well-run company (from a purely corporate perspective). Honestly, if Bezos can bring on board some of his Amazon folks, he may well save the news as a business.
Amazon believes in ‘eating its own lunch’….they will create a potentially killer app that will destroy their own product category, but they will do it all very strategically. So I expect that the WP will be kindled.
I bet this is a fun, but expensive experiment for Bezos.
I agree with other commenters: Mr. Bezos, hire Booman!
Does Amazon make a profit yet? Or is it all stock money?
Yes, and it has for some time.
I am awed by their continuous innovations.
As a Amazon marketplace seller, I have a love/ hate relationship with them. But at least they aren’t evil or inept corporations like Walmart or Barnes n Noble.
All good advice, I suppose, although it would destroy immediately the WaPo “brand” and be quite a radical bizness move.
Whatever he does, here we have another of our rapidly declining news sources bought by one of our corporate oligarchs. Since Bezos doesn’t appear to be a crazed rightwing monster ala Boss Rupert, the hive can point to this development as Just More Lib’rul Media. But it’s difficult to see how Amazon’s bizness needs won’t influence news content. Amazon, for example, built its existence on the state sales tax avoidance exemption of internet sales, which Dems recently attempted to (finally) end. Repubs killed it, of course.
This little sales tax scam has done its part to destroy small retailers across America, particularly in small towns, since how can one survive a Wal-mart out in the town’s asteroid belt and the online Amazon behemoth? You can’t, so you shutter the family furniture or clothing biz and soon the entire Main Street is dead, except for the elderly barber. Take a drive across the Land of the Free, especially where Pinhead Palin’s Real Americans(tm) live. A retail and economic wasteland. Of course, Amazon supports continuing the sales tax exemption.
Anyway, I suppose the WaPo is so useless and compromised that any chance of change is good. But having the nation’s plutocrats and corporate oligarchs control more and more of the media has been a disaster, and this is just more of the same.
I read that the new emphasis on next-day delivery at Amazon means that they have to have physical facilities in nearly every state, which means that they are now subject to the sales tax in nearly every state, and therefore Bezos now supports eliminating the exemption.
To me the most salient fact about Amazon is that it’s entirely native to the World Wide Web. For the first few years the Web was just kind of a novelty, but then people started thinking about how to make money off of it. And whatever else you can say about Jeff Bezos, he did show some good common sense here, because where everyone else was following this business model where you design a totally cool site that doesn’t actually do anything useful and then launch an IPO, he started a store.
So it’s not just about avoiding taxes. To me Amazon is very much like Google in that I have to admit that it’s an impressive operation. It might be impressive and deeply evil, but it’s still impressive. I don’t actually think Google and Amazon are evil, myself, but they are gigantic, they’re very good at what they do, and they have their own interests.
And they’re growing all the time. Amazon is getting more and more into cloud computing, for instance, which is completely separate from online retail.
This and a few other things have got me thinking that maybe there is something to this whole singularity business. I read this at Charles Stross’s blog yesterday:
Yes, the existing book sellers were reluctant to devote resources to the web. I used to be a regular customer of Barnes & Noble and used their web site when they built it. Then I ordered a book I really really wanted. One month later they canceled the order saying the book was not available. One month! I could have ordered from Amazon and known at once the status. I started ordering exclusively from Amazon and Alibris. Then Alibris sent me a book that was in no way “like new” and I found there was no way to complain. Now, new or used, I order exclusively from Amazon. I have had problems with Amazon Partners and once with shipping damage from Amazon itself. I received prompt return address labels and credit to my Mastercard. Now I occasionally drop into B&N, but only to see what is in the deep discount (under $10 – under $4) bins.
I don’t think Amazon built it’s business on sales tax exemption but rather on customer service, service the big box book stores failed to provide. I am concerned that they are becoming a monopoly, but no one touches their quality. The free shipping on orders over $25 induces me to keep my orders over that. I probably spend about $250 a year there, twice what I spent at physical book stores where I would waste a lot of time fruitlessly searching for something new. Now, 24 hours a day, I can sit in front of my computer in my underwear (sorry for the mental image) and order.
Check on Amazon’s advantages. Very wide selection of titles too in nonfiction, where I spend 90% of my reading time. And if a wrong or duplicate title is sent by mistake, it’s easily corrected.
I do however miss going into a good independent well-stocked bookstore. But, to my knowledge, none exist nearby these days. A few used bookstores are still around.
B&N always kind of disappointed me — large, promising physical stores, but filled with a depressingly small number of titles, usually of the middle-brow/bestseller variety (the late Borders chain used to carry far more titles). And their nonfiction titles are heavy on RW current event books, of the Clinton/Obama-bashing variety, while their offerings in History/Biography are not extensive, except for books on Hitler, and popular (often dubious) books on the Kennedys and Marilyn.
The existing B&N stores in my area are mostly used not for book browsing and buying, but for students studying in the cafe area at night, and for customers buying nonbook items. Sad and depressing situation. Especially for those of us who have yet to warm to the ebook format and prefer the physical item, to read, hold and keep, and put on the shelf to go back to time and again.
Much of that, from what I’ve read, is because other booksellers couldn’t spend years selling at a loss. Amazon, due to the internet bubble, could. If my local bookshop could’ve done it without going bankrupt, they would’ve. Amazon has a fantastic business model, but it involves, far as I can tell, transforming an entire industry into a loss leader in order to establish, as you said, a monopoly.
Maybe Bezos will expand the Post into every local market and charge less than the local paper can. WP Dubuque and WP Boston and WP Dallas. They’ll lose a nickel on every paper sold, but the stock prices will soar, and in ten years they’ll make a nickel on every thousand papers sold, and reporters will be paying them. Because they’ll be the only game in town.
Good local bookseller a will survive. BN will split up. The college stores may be sold off as a separate unit. I don’t see how the big box trade retail unit survives.
Three of my excellent local booksellers already went under. They were functioning mostly as a display center for Amazon. People would come in, browse for books, get helped by the staff, then buy from Amazon for less.
I just checked, and found this, which is fairly sympathetic to Amazon, I think: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-08/amazons-jeff-bezos-doesnt-care-about-profit-margins
Scares the hell out of me.
I’ve heard the same about Best Buy. Yet, I used to buy there for the convenience even though prices were higher. Then prices got ridiculously higher and teen-age sales personnel started badgering me to buy somet5hing I didn’t want with all sorts of fallacious arguments. I remember one’s astonishment when he kept flipping a TV from Standard definition to High definition saying, “See the difference?” and my answering, “No” again and again. Very few of us that are 60+ can see the difference. Old cataracted eyes only have so much resolution.
That aside, I can’t see waiting for the mail to deliver a book at $22 that I could buy for $25 + $2.50 Illinois tax. Other people may have tighter budgets. I’ve always judged my relative wealth by whether I could buy any book I wanted without checking the budget. Sometimes I can buy hardcovers without a care, sometimes I have to agonize over paperbacks, and once, when I was unemployed, I couldn’t even buy a remainder for $1, instead sneaking long peeks at it in the store.
You have to look at Amazon’s cloud services, too, because that’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of their operation. I read that they’re projected to make $3.8 billion from cloud services this year.
I have no idea how cloud services fit into the profit margins, but it’s totally separate from retail. And I don’t think there are any real competitors at the moment.
PC vs cloud has been an argument ever since the ’50s. Personally, I can see cloud service for off-site storage of vital business records but it is a mystery to me why anyone wants their personal data stored in a place they do not control. I have a USB 3.0 drive for backup and a USB 2.0 drive backing that up. I have the most critical data on USB sticks and DVD’s (multiple copies). I became fanatic about backup roughly 30 years ago where the central hard drive (yes one!) in the Ag engineering department at International Harvester crashed erasing about six months coding work, including mine. I then backed up everything on 8 inch floppies (Dysan) with a backup of the backup. But all my data and backups are under my control not some data mining service.
Both B&N and Border’s should have been major players in the on-line book world. They couldn’t adapt. I doubt it was predatory pricing. With brick and mortar profits to sustain them they should have been able to fight an on-line price war.
Farm modernization had just as big an impact on the closure of Main Street. Less farm jobs means less workers, means less people to buy stuff in small town Main Street shops.
Two words: Matt Taibbi. Dare I hope?
Sadly, Bezos is a right wing libertarian, and this will never happen.
Good stuff. The only thing I would add is a good knowledge of history. A fair amount of BS in the beltway is about revising history of the past (eg. Roberts court). You can’t call BS on someone if you don’t know anything about it.
“She is tough, she is determined, she is prepared,” [chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Hal] Rogers said. “She is also accommodating. But once she gets to a place, she is a bulldozer you can’t move.”
fett verbrennungs ofen
Probably not the sort of advice that the parent company and president of the CIA’s cloud computing contractor would find beneficial.
Something sort of Time-Warner & AOLish about this deal.