Ever since Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post a decade ago, people wondered if the Amazon founder would find a magic formula for newspapers to survive in the new millennium.
The answer appears to be “not yet, but there’s hope.”
That’s one of my take-aways from “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post,” a new book by Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor from 2013 to early 2021.
Baron chronicles the paper’s evolution under Bezos, attacks by former President Donald Trump and journalistic triumphs during those pivotal years.
The book is a humdinger for news and political junkies, journalists and anyone wanting to know what happened backstage as the paper that brought down President Richard Nixon worked to hold Trump accountable.
It also details what Bezos did to save the paper, and how he found resolve and inspiration in the organization. This answers some, but not all, the questions about motive that I floated when he bought the place in 2013.
“I think he just believes in the mission,” Baron said by phone. “It sounds naive and credulous, but I’ve seen no evidence otherwise and I’ve seen a lot of evidence that that statement is true.”
Baron will discuss the book Monday at a Town Hall Seattle event with Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times. Details are at townhallseattle.org.
I interviewed Baron about his experiences with Bezos, lessons for the news industry and more. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:
Dudley: Thank you for writing this book. So much of what we do never gets put into the paper.
Baron: Yes, people should know how we do our work. It’s not always pretty. It can also be messy. But I think the public should know how things really happen. That was one of the things I was trying to do, is give people insight into how newsrooms actually work and what kinds of judgments are made. People can agree or disagree with my decisions and judgments, but they should at least understand why I made them.
Q: As you write, the Post under Bezos did great things but it’s not immune to industry challenges. Still, are there lessons to help local newspapers survive?
A: I think so. Every news organization has to figure out their own strategy but I think the first thing is to not despair. People at the Post were pretty despairing. We weren’t sure when he bought it that it could be pulled out of its tailspin. But he wasn’t discouraged and that instilled a lot of hope in us. We need to say there can be a solution, we need to get about the business of working on it, and we shouldn’t despair. That’s number one.
Number two is that so much depends on the strategy that you set. It wasn’t obvious to everybody at the time but it was obvious to him we needed to change our strategy. That is that we needed to become national and even international. The question was how do we go about doing that without adding a huge amount of costs when we didn’t have the revenues.
Three, we clearly need to be digital, that’s where people are. We can mourn print’s loss, but we need to move on and recognize where and how people like to get information and be creative about delivering it to them.
Another reason for the Post’s success is that we delivered something that people really valued.
Q: Meaning?
A: They were concerned about Donald Trump, they were concerned he might not be held accountable if he became president and when he became president, they were concerned that the courts and Congress wouldn’t do their job, and so they were looking at the press and, for the first time in a long time, not taking the press for granted. They saw basically two institutions at the forefront of holding Trump accountable and that was The New York Times and The Washington Post, so they supported us.
I talk in the book about how we came up with (the slogan) “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As Bezos said, this is an idea people want to belong to, not a newspaper they want to subscribe to. The idea was shining light in dark corners, holding government to account, holding our representatives to high standards and all of that. People were willing to get behind that and help pay for it. That’s what we needed. That’s a part of what local news organizations need to do, in terms of keeping a watchful eye on the police and city council, state government, school boards, you name it. And they need to be providing people real value day in and day out, information about their own communities, that people say “I would really miss this if this were gone, every day I’m getting something of value here,” so that they’re willing to pay for it.
Q: I appreciated his comments about reversing 20 years of giving news away for free. How important is finding ways to get paid for news online?
A: There’s no question it’s a key part of it. It’s a hard one because people have been so accustomed now for so long to getting information for free online. The reality is that they’re not going to get information of any quality online unless they pay for it. It takes money to do real reporting and I think there’s a growing recognition, certainly among people who are deeply engaged in the community, people who run community organizations, that all of a sudden there are no reporters to cover anything they do. I’ve seen this all over the country, and they are really concerned now in a way that they weren’t before.
Q: You describe three decision-making “gates” Bezos used to decide on buying the Post. What other gates were involved?
A: I don’t know. I kept looking for some other agenda. You almost hesitate to say it because it sounds so credulous and that is, I think he believes firmly in American democracy. He thinks that the press is a really important institution, even if he’s the target of it, he wants it to be good, he wants it to be strong and wants it to be healthy. And I think he recognizes that if it isn’t, then American democracy is going to suffer.
Q: I’ve thought Bezos blossomed as a publisher, and become more passionate about the mission as he learned more about the paper. Is that fair?
A: Yeah, I think that’s true. First of all, he liked the success we had at the beginning so that certainly helps. Secondly, some of his theories about how we could turn ourselves around turned out to be true. That was good. Also, he’s been the recipient of a lot of attacks by Trump. Trump tried determinedly to sabotage his business. A lot of business people would just say this isn’t worth the trouble, this is hurting my business, I don’t think I can do this, but Bezos is definitely not a quitter. I think he feels very committed to trying to make this work.
Brier Dudley on Twitter: @BrierDudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: https://st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com.
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