I’m excited to let you see what I worked on during the spring semester at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy: a paper on the reinvention of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos titled “The Bezos Effect.” It’s long, but I also wrote a summary version for my friends at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
My time as a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School was incredibly rewarding. An expanded version of my paper will appear in my book-in-progress, which has a working title of The Return of the Moguls and which will be published by ForeEdge, the trade imprint of University Press of New England, in 2017.
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This piece was so interesting and well written and reported that I read the whole thing in one sitting — on a small phone screen! Looking forward to the book.
I enjoyed reading the long piece and I learned a lot (especially about technological infrastructure at a newspaper and more specifically at the Washington Post).
My overall reaction to the subject is that I feel, as a news consumer, as though there’s more potential for being taken advantage of, in ways I don’t want to, through online interaction to obtain news than through traditional print newspaper subscriptions. That’s one of the things that influences my participation with the newer ways of obtaining the news. It sometimes comes across to me as though the online resources are facades for something with unseen tentacles looking for more [food]. It would take me money to buy into the newest ways of getting the news, and energy to learn how to use them, and, given my concerns about being drawn into something other than I thought I bargained for, I don’t find the activation energy to make the effort. But I’m not part of a demographic that is being courted, I suspect, so my reaction and preferences probably aren’t all that important.