Keeping Posted

Bezos wants clickbait! More departures.

Forget the seven principles enunciated by my namesake Eugene Meyer

The Washington Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos made it clear to a select group of Post people he hosted at his Kalorama, DC mansion for a four-hour feast of fancy food and gab. His “mission” for the formerly great newspaper he bought in 2013 can be summed up in one word: Clickbait. Or, if you prefer, in a hyphenated two-word phrase: data-driven journalism, which, as I’ve written before, is an oxymoron.

Yes, quality journalism is expensive. It can cost thousands to produce some stories, which could yield Pulitzers but not profits. But that reality does not meet the Bezos test. His “mission” is financial “sustainability” uber alles, no matter what.

Gone are the principles enunciated by my namesake Eugene Meyer (no relation), who purchased the paper at a 1933 bankruptcy sale and built it into a hallowed national institution. You know, the paper of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, of Ben Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein, of Katharine Graham and Donald Graham.

Eugene Meyer’s “Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper” included:

“The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of the owner. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men."

The paper gave me a career (1970-2004) and a credential I still carry with pride. Even if The Washington Post is no longer, as I’ve also written, the “Washington” Post, even if its billionaire owner and his henchmen have shuttered Book World, obliterated Metro, closed foreign bureaus, fired all photographers, and laid waste to the once legendary Sports section, filled now only with wire service copy.

Even after the Feb. 3 newsroom massacre, in which more than 350 were impersonally, via Zoom and email, laid off, the bleeding continues. But now the story has shifted to voluntary departures and the possibility of a new Washington newspaper to be published by Robert Albritton, whose father Joseph Allbritton once owned the Washington Star, which folded in 1981, and with two former Post reporters started POLITICO, the capital’s source for political news. The new publication could revive the name of the Washington Star, or, in celestial symmetry, be the Washington Sun.

As many Post stars have landed at The New York Times and Times-owned Athletic, at The Athletic, at USA Today, at ESPN and elsewhere, a new wave of departures appears headed to the new venture . The brightest star in the newly forming firmament may be Dana Milbank, whose biting political columns were long a feature of the Post’s Sunday opinion pages—until, neutered, he was exiled to the Health and Welfare Section. There he has written about the joys of country life in rural Rappahannock County, Virginia, where he owns a farm. He will resume his political columns and, he says, continue to write occasionally from the country, to maintain his sanity.

Milbank’s announcement that he is heading to the new Allbritton venture has been the talk of media circles, and beyond, as disaffected former Post subscribers have flooded his Facebook page with congratulations and heartfelt thanks. For its part, NOTUS —- News of the United States, a POLITCO spinoff — gleefully listed nine new hires, seven from the Post. These include chief economic correspondent Jeff Stein (who wrote on X, “My faith in the paper’s current leadership is broken beyond repair.”), Hill columnist Paul Kane, Sports enterprise reporter Sam Fortier, national health reporter Paige Cunningham, and Department of Data columnist Andre van Dam.

The last departure is particularly puzzling, as Bezos maintains that data must be the Post’s raison d’être, surpassin even its masthead slogan Bezos once blessed: Democracy Dies in Darkness. Now it’s the Post Lives or Dies in Metrics.

Which brings me back to data-driven journalism. Under Bezos’ current rule, stories are judged not on importance to the public or their impact on the community but on whether the staff time and resources — salaries and expenses — required to produce them yield a measurable financial return on that investment.

Responding to Bezos, Executive Editor Matt Murray, according to The New York Times, “examined customer data to assess which sections generated the most readership and compared that against the cost to produce the coverage.” The Times did not say whether print and digital data were separately assessed. But it would not surprise me if digital subscribers, largely a national and international audience, have little interest in local DC sports or Metro news coverage. Those were two sections the newsroom cost cutters easily dispensed with. But why were most foreign correspondents also laid off, including in the Middle East, with war breaking out?

Jeff D’Onofrio, the company’s acting president and CEO, with no prior newspaper experience, according to the Times story, was apparently shocked to learn that in some areas it costs “multiple thousands of dollars to publish one story.”

In my decades at the Post, I worked on some ten series of articles that arguably cost more to produce than could be shown to have returned in revenue. The late John Feinstein and I spent six weeks investigating a suburban police “death squad” where cops’ informants recruited suspects to commit convenience store robberies the cops staked out and then fatally shot the suspects. One summer, the Post rented a 46-foor motorsailer so that photographer Jim Thresher and I could spend 38 days and nights on the Chesapeake Bay for an eight part “Chesapeake Journal.” I did another series on farm preservation, and yet another on corruption in DC waste collections.

None of these were one-day wonders. Doubtless my bylines were seen less often. But these articles, along with Watergate, were, I like to think, what made the Post great.

The concept was that the paper was a package offering something for everyone whose pieces could not be individually judged based on how many readers (and hence advertisers) they attracted. Enter the Internet, which was both good news and bad news. Where previously the paper relied on small focus groups and surveys to determine reader interest, stories could now be ranked not on their quality or impact on society but solely on clicks. The dreaded quota system had arrived — data-driven journalism — as a way to value in purely monetary terms the work of reporters and editors. Practicing journalism, we used to believe, was a craft. Our union was The Newspaper Guild. We were not factory workers, and “the product” was not widgets.

How foolish were we?