Yesterday, the Washington Post dumped Sally Buzbee their executive editor. Or she quit. Or they asked her to leave and she quit.
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WaPo, as it’s affectionately known, lost $77m last year, lost half its readers since 2020, and, Sunday night, so as not be scooped by the New York Times who was circling this story, they sent a note to staff who lost their mind. They asked “ideals; not ideas” Will Lewis their newish CEO — who arrived planless — when Jeff Bezos hired him to run his newspaper a few months back — what his plan was.
That didn’t sit well. So he drew a pronounal line in the sand. You write stuff people don’t read. I need to fix this. The emphasis was most definitely his. Apparently, there isn’t an I in his team.
There was also lines drawn across gender and color. When Lewis showed up a few months ago, the leadership was all women.
His new plan is to break the newsroom into three newsrooms. One will be news. One will be opinion. One will be service and social media. All will be run by white men in their 40s and 50s.
That didn’t sit well. When you instigate investigative reporters, they ask questions. “Did you consider diverse candidates? Who did you interview?”
A few years back, his answer would have mollified most people. “The best people for the jobs.” Matt Murray who was the editor at the Wall Street Journal will take over until the election. After that, deputy editor Robert Winnett will come over from the Telegraph in the U.K.
These days, that illicited groans at Monday’s staff meeting, a tersely worded letter from WaPo’s writer’s guild (fancy term for union), and charts about the demographic breakdown of the District of Columbia on Twitter/X.
Now, if any of you reading this gave a darn about the goings on at the Washington Post, you know all this. You’ve obsessed about it. You’ve followed the media people who cover other media people who know all this and obsess about it.
But here’s what’s interesting about this. At least to me. This didn’t super trend on X. No matter how many of the same oft-repeated quotes showed up in tweets, no one cared.
This… this… is the depth to which news has sunk. We simply don’t care. Several months before (I can’t believe I’m using this phrase) …one of the most important elections in American history with the outcome very much unknown…the newspaper of record in America’s capital changes leadership, composition, and perhaps direction and mainstreet can’t muster a meh.
This is a sign of so much change. For so many reasons. Twitter began life and put its flywheel in motion by being the platform for journalists. Their echo chamber exploded off Twitter and into the real world. The words typeset in print reflected back to the Twitterverse. The synergies abounded. That connection has been severed.
After so many cycles of news slant, trust issues, and business issues, news about news doesn’t cause a stir. We’re not even fed up. We can take it. Or leave it. Networks are over. Woodward and Bernstein are long gone.
But there is a story here. All those stories. How much has changed. How little there is left to change.
And this. My one little thesis. A conspiracy theory. Rich people bought media. Bezos owns the Post. Salesforce founder, Marc Benioff owns Time. Rich guy Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. Bloomberg owns Bloomberg. Why?
Why did Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? To save democracy while he undercuts physical commerce? No. I’m going to go with… to curry favor with politicians so he can undercut physical commerce. So his cloud service business, AWS, can win government contracts.
So what does that have to do with a newsroom shakeup? One that inserts people who led media businesses for Rupert Murdoch at the top of the Post? Maybe Bezos thinks he needs people more likeable to whoever is president in November?
Now, if I could just find a parking garage filled with Amazon delivery trucks and someone to tell why money people would do this, then… then maybe someone would care.
