Avalanche, earthquake, shock, thunderbolt -- these are the words being used to describe the sale of one of America’s leading newspapers, The Washington Post, to the CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos.
“This will be the first time that a major newspaper has been owned by a tech revolutionary. I’ve criticized Bezos and Amazon heavily over the years, but there’s no doubt the man is a business genius who understands the Internet as well as anyone. The question is, how will it affect the quality of the paper’s journalism?” asks Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review.
There is no doubt that trends at The Washington Post were serious. Circulation had dropped almost 50% - from 8,32,000 average subscribers to 4,75,000 - over the last 20 years. The newsroom staff strength was reduced from more than a thousand to just over 600. But the paper is still an example of excellent journalism. In June, along with The Guardian, it broke the Edward Snowden-National Security Agency surveillance story, and also got the first interview with the leader of the recent Egyptian military coup, Abdel Fatah al- Sisi. But there is also no doubt that when the sale deal was finalized last month, the Post was clearly a diminished version of its old self. It is still an icon in the nation’s capital, but not in the way its rival, the New York Times, is.
Maybe that’s why the family that owns it acknowledged that The Post could survive, but they had to sell it because they wanted the paper to do better than just “survive”. Although people did expect the Post to be rescued by a millionaire, no one expected it to be the 49-year-old Bezos, who definitely has the means but so far no credentials in the news business. But he is worth $25 billion and buying and operating the money-losing Post wouldn’t scare him, even when the Post’s newspaper division lost more than $49 million in the first six months of this year.
But there are still questions about Jeff’s vision about the Post. If Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates had bought the newspaper, it would have been a somewhat easier picture to discern. Bezos is still busy developing his business. His main outside interest has been to invest in Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company. He has invested tens of millions of dollars in a 10,000-year-old clock. No doubt, the experience with Amazon gives him an extraordinary grasp of everything from technology to the consumer behaviour of millions of people, but why he paid a quarter of a billion dollars in cash for a newspaper remains an open question.
Some experts contend that the sort of computer resources and ingenuity Bezos can bring to washingonpost. com may surpass almost every other regional provider of advertising, news, communication and entertainment. They also predict that Bezos will be inclined to use his foothold in one of the nation’s richest corners to go after the most lucrative parts of other businesses. So they are warning all competing broadcast operations, cable systems, web properties or mobile phone systems in the Washington area to be ready.
To me, the Washington Post will always be the gutsy newspaper which broke the Watergate scandal story leading to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. I remember legendary managing editor Ben Bradlee, who always fought on behalf of the reporters, big or small. When the story of a burglary in the Democratic Party headquarters in the posh Watergate complex in Washington morphed into a White House scandal story, the National Desk at the Post wanted to take over the story from the junior crime reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Bradlee argued that the story should remain with the reporters who broke it, but when the National Desk editor insisted, Bradlee simply transferred the two budding reporters to the National Desk. The rest is history and the paper became famous as one driven by solid journalists and principled editors.
But now, the question is, does the new owner have a strategy to revive the Post as a newspaper that is journalistically solid as well as robustly profitable? “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads,” said Bezos in his first message to the Post employees. The message also made an obvious observation about how “the Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding longreliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs”.
There are some experts who believe that with no need to answer to any stockholders, Bezos might be able to put journalism first. But one thing is certain - the era of family-owned newspapers seems to be ending and a new era, in which tech moguls seem anxious to buy Print properties, is emerging. The Indian Print media should take serious note.
(Author/news analyst Ravi M. Khanna is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. He was formerly with VOA in Washington)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
