Come what may, Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post can only be viewed as a blessing since the Watergate paper had been increasingly taking on water in these more digital times. At least it has a chance now, a decent one. From Michael Meyer’s new CJR report about the Post during the formative stages of its Amazonian era, as the company ramps up in earnest to dominate the world, or, you know, something:
“Editors and reporters talk about the Post becoming a ‘global’ paper. They say that the Post will create a news ‘bundle’ that will repackage all the elements of the print newspaper in a way that readers will pay for in digital form. Using tablets and other devices, Bezos aims to recreate the intimate, cohesive, and somewhat linear consumption experience of old media in a way that makes sense for digital. The newsroom has also been told that the paper will cultivate an audience of 100 million unique visitors. Or paid digital subscribers. One hundred million something. They say that, unlike traditional newspaper publishers with their notions of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, their new owner thinks in terms of hundreds of millions. I asked editor Marty Baron why the 100-million number kept coming up in my conversations. What did it refer to? ‘We don’t have a set goal for a hundred million of anything, okay?’ he told me. ‘We just want to grow, that’s all. There’s a desire to increase our number of unique visitors by a very significant degree.’
Given this rather loose mingling of the rhetorical and the actual, of the far horizon and the near-term, it’s not surprising that the mood at the paper is a mix of excitement and confusion. By the time of [publisher Katharine] Weymouth’s town-hall event in April, the Post had already begun to increase staff after a decade of layoffs and buyouts. The hires, aimed at Weymouth’s newly acquired goal of expanding the national audience, were spread across a mix of aggregation projects, blogs, and digital opinion columns, as well as more traditional reporting roles, though the common theme of all the hires was ‘digital sensibility,’ as Baron likes to say.
One reporter told me of the inevitable confusion among the staff, given Weymouth’s sudden push for a strategy of expansion that is ‘directly contrary’ to the previous one of narrowing the paper’s focus. ‘The pendulum swung all the way over and now it’s swinging all the way back again, without anyone ever saying how that came to be or why we’re doing this other than that we need more traffic,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s thrilled that we’re hiring again, and hiring really good people for the most part. But it’s not clear to the rank and file how this comes together into a vision for what we want to do and what we want to be. That’s been the problem for 15 years.’
An editor added: ‘I think Bezos wants us to be everything for everyone, the same way Amazon is.'”
