Jeff Bezos this week interrupted a holiday in Mykonos, Greece on his $500mn yacht Koru with his fiancée Lauren Sánchez to reassure the agitated journalists of the lossmaking Washington Post. “I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” wrote Amazon’s founder.
The figure to whom he lent his backing after days of internal turmoil was Sir Will Lewis, a former FT journalist and editor of The Daily Telegraph. Lewis’s stewardship of the news publication that Bezos acquired for half the price of his yacht in 2013 is under intense scrutiny. But the memo had a sting: “The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business.”
Bezos’s brilliance in disrupting industries since he founded Amazon 30 years ago this July has made him a $204bn fortune and enabled him to build his Blue Origin space venture. But the US news business, with its proud cadre of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists striving to honour their traditional mission amid the onslaught of digital information, has been tough to transform.
Tensions broke out as Lewis, the Post’s publisher and chief executive, addressed journalists after Sally Buzbee resigned as executive editor. “We are losing large amounts of money . . . People are not reading your stuff,” he said bluntly. His remedy was to divide editorial responsibilities and recruit Robert Winnett, deputy editor of The Telegraph in the UK, to head one of three “newsrooms”.
In the ensuing revolt, the New York Times and the Post itself have carried stories questioning the ethics of Lewis and Winnett in previous jobs. On Friday, Winnett withdrew from his appointment. It is a touchy subject, since Lewis is among a wave of senior British journalists being hired by US news organisations, including Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal.
Bezos now faces calls to play a more direct role in guiding the Post through its crisis: “He has got to step up and be more involved,” Kara Swisher, the technology journalist who started her career in its mailroom, said this week. Some miss the days when it was both owned and guided by the Graham family. “This place was built around a familial presence,” says one Post journalist.
Don Graham, son of Watergate-era publisher Katharine Graham, persuaded Bezos to acquire the Post for $250mn as the internet threatened. Bezos initially resisted, but then concluded that it was important to rescue “the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world”, as he phrased it later.
Bezos’s wealth, technological insight and business acumen seemed to work at first. By 2018, the Post’s digital readership had expanded, it had returned to profit and his purchase appeared vindicated. “When I am 90, it is going to be one of the things I am most proud of, that I took on the Post and helped them through a very rough transition,” he reflected.
He spoke too soon. Below the surface, it remained primarily a metropolitan publication, rather than one with national and global reach, even if its city was Washington, DC. As the “Trump bump” in digital traffic faded, it lacked the heft of the New York Times and neither Buzbee nor Fred Ryan, its former publisher, had an answer.
The Post was a strange fit for Bezos, a relentless innovator who founded Amazon in Seattle at the age of 30 after leaving the hedge fund DE Shaw on Wall Street. Amazon’s other media ventures, from Kindle in book publishing to Amazon Prime video, have challenged incumbents rather than rebuilding an established brand.
Bezos has also evolved personally since buying the Post. He was always an ebullient man with a loud laugh, but his amiable geekiness has given way to a more muscular and flashily-dressed persona following his divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019 and partnership with Sánchez. He has focused on Blue Origin’s rivalry with Elon Musk’s SpaceX since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021, although he remains executive chair.
His high regard for the Post’s reporters, combined with his deliberate distance from management, is unchanged. He invites groups to his mansion in the DC neighbourhood of Kalorama and journalists say that he is touchingly appreciative. But he has largely left editorial oversight to others, as if the news business has a mystical quality that is beyond him.
This deference is not shared by Musk, who told the Cannes Lions advertising festival this week that journalists mostly “read the internet and print it out” and their work is replaceable by “real-time aggregation of the wisdom of millions of people” on his social media platform X. While Musk touts technology, Bezos trusts the human factor.
But the Post’s challenge is urgent, and behind the fuss about US and UK journalism lies the question of what he does if Lewis, his chosen agent of change, gets spat out by the newsroom. As Bezos wrote of corporate cultures in Amazon’s 2015 letter to shareholders, “for better or worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change.” His patience with this one may not endure indefinitely.
The following year, he wrote about why he always ran Amazon as if it were still “day one”: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” It would be out of character were he not watching the Post’s tumult and asking whether, despite all the Pulitzers, that is its fate.
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