I want to let you know about one of the biggest events that Ellen Clegg and I have had to discuss our book, “What Works in Community News.” We’ll take part in a public conversation on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine. The institute is part of Northeastern University. You can register here.
The program is part of the “Newsroom Live” series, sponsored by the Maine Trust for Local News, the nonprofit owner of the Portland Press Herald and a number of other daily and weekly newspapers and digital publications.
The Maine Trust was created several years ago after the media properties were acquired by the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that has also purchased papers in suburban Denver and Georgia to prevent them from falling into the hands of corporate chain owners.
We write about the National Trust and include a conversation with its executive director, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, in our book. In addition, I wrote about the Press Herald’s pre-Trust ownership struggles in his 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.”
Shailesh Prakash, former chief technologist at The Washington Post. Photo (cc) 2017 by Nordiske Mediedager.
Several months ago, Brian Stelter wrote an article (gift link) for The Atlantic exploring how The Washington Post had lost its way. During the Trump years, the Post thrived under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, adding audience and staff as well as turning a profit. Since then, all three of those metrics have nose-dived. Bezos’ choice to turn things around, publisher Will Lewis, is beset by ethical problems that no one seems to want to deal with.
All those issues are explored in detail by Stelter, but there was one fact that stood out to me: The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line. Stelter wrote:
In 2021, the Post’s total profit was about $60 million. In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. [Then-publisher Fred] Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.
If Ryan was right, then there was nothing wrong with the Post that getting Arc under control wouldn’t fix. I was surprised, and I filed that factoid away for future use. Well, the future arrived this week, as the Post announced it was laying off about 25% of Arc’s staff — more than 50 people — in order to stem those losses.
What happened? Stories about the layoffs in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) and Axios don’t really make it clear. But it seems that what at one time had looked like a smart bet on the future went south in a serious way.
CMS’s are universally loathed, but Arc was billed as something different and better — simple and built in a modular manner to made it easier to add features. It’s fast. To this day, the Post’s mobile apps load much more quickly than The New York Times’. The Boston Globe is an Arc customer, and if you use its Arc-based apps (look for a white “B” against a black background), content loads more or less instantly.
When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash touted Arc as a key to the Post’s future success. Internally, the Post’s iteration of Arc featured the infamous “MartyBot” — an image of then-executive editor Marty Baron that popped up on a journalist’s screen as a reminder that a deadline was approaching. One of Arc’s customers was Mark Zusman, the editor and publisher of Willamette Week in Oregon. He told me by email:
They flew a team out here and within three months we were up and running. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly it happened. Arc creates enormous functionality under the hood. I have a happy news team (talk about unusual) and the Post is rolling out improvements on a regular basis.
Prakash told me that he hoped Arc might help the Post become the hub of a news ecosystem that would benefit both the Post and news organizations that licensed the CMS:
I would love it if the platform we built for the Post was powering a lot of other media organizations. That would definitely break down the silos for content sharing, a lot of the silos for analytics, for personalization. The larger the scale the better you can do in some of those scenarios. But those are still aspirational at this point.
Well, Prakash is long gone, and is now vice president of news at Google. Baron has retired. And Arc has failed to deliver on its promise of becoming a revenue-generator for the Post as well as a way for the paper to establish itself as the center of a network of Arc-using news organizations.
I hope we find out what happened. I know that Arc is expensive — probably too expensive for it to be adopted by more than a handful of news clients. Still Axios reports that the CMS has more than 2,500 customers. Maybe the layoffs will allow for a reset that will lead to future growth. But the story of Arc sounds like one of opportunity that slipped away.
The Star Tribune of Minneapolis has been something of a doppelgänger for The Boston Globe as well as a model. Like the Globe, the Strib, as it is known, has emerged as a profitable, growing enterprise under the guidance of a billionaire sports owner.
In Boston, of course, that’s John Henry, who’s also the principal owner of the Red Sox. In Minneapolis, it’s Glen Taylor, the principal owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. Both men have other sports interests as well. I wrote about Henry’s struggles with the Globe in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls”; the paper didn’t really take off until sometime after that. My collaborator Ellen Clegg wrote about the Star Tribune in our 2024 book, “What Works in Community News.”
The parallels don’t stop there. The Globe, formerly a New England-wide paper that had contracted to Eastern Massachusetts, has been expanding in recent years, with editions in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and more to come. Executives at the Strib have been working to re-establish the paper as a Minnesota-wide entity.
Now the Strib has taken the next step. In a post for our website, What Works, Ellen writes about the Strib’s rebranding as The Minnesota Star Tribune and the innovative approach being taken by the Strib’s new opinion editor, Phillip Morris. Among other things, Morris is building up an ambitious roster of community writers known as Strib Voices and has abolished political endorsements in favor of a deeper dive into candidates and issues — something Ellen, as a retired editorial-page editor at the Globe, takes a keen interest in.
I’d be surprised if the Globe drops endorsements. Indeed, the paper just unveiled its first endorsement of the 2024 election, backing Mara Dolan in the Democratic primary for Governor’s Council. But at a time when they are increasingly seen as an anachronism, and with even The New York Times ending local and statewide endorsements, I’d also be surprised if it’s not at least being talked about at the Globe.
Steve Bailey’s profile of Jack Connors in The Boston Globe Magazine of June 3, 2007
In his obituary of Boston businessman and philanthropist Jack Connors, who died Tuesday at 82, Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard reminds us that Connors was part of several failed attempts to buy the Globe from the New York Times Co., which finally sold it to financier and Red Sox principal owner John Henry in 2013. Marquard’s obit, by the way, is remarkable, and includes quotes from an interview Connors gave just last week as he was dying of cancer.
The first time Connors’ name came up in connection with an attempt to purchase the Globe was in the fall of 2006, when he partnered with retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch and concession magnate Joseph O’Donnell. But with Times Co. chief executive Janet Robinson all but coming right out and saying the Globe was not for sale, talk of a Welch-led sale faded away. O’Donnell died earlier this year, and Welch — who died in 2020 — does not enjoy the sterling reputation he had back when he was at the height of his power and influence.
Connors’ second run at the Globe came in 2011, when he was part of a group headed by entrepreneur Aaron Kushner, who tried to convince the Times Co. to sell him the paper even though the paper’s executives were adamant that it wasn’t available. Former Globe publisher Ben Taylor and his cousin Steve Taylor, himself a former top Globe official, were involved in the Kushner bid as well. At that time Poynter business analyst Rick Edmonds wrote that with the Globe’s business having stabilized following a crisis in 2009 and the Times Co.’s debt burden eased, “It looks to me like a keeper for the company — unless someone comes forward with cash and is prepared to way overpay.”
Ultimately Kushner was spurned, and then he lost out on a bid to purchase the Portland Press Herald in Maine. In 2012, a Kushner-headed group bought The Orange County Register in Southern California, and he quickly ran it into the ground with a hiring spree that he mistakenly believed would result in a massive influx of new readers and advertising revenues. (I wrote about Kushner’s misadventures in Boston, Portland and Orange County for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”) Today the Register is a shell of its former self, having been acquired out of bankruptcy by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group.
Connors’ name also came up in 2013 before the Globe was purchased by Henry.
What kind of a newspaper owner would Jack Connors have been? He was kind and generous, according to all accounts, but he would have been a minority owner with only a limited say in the Globe’s direction. Globe readers should be glad that the paper was never headed by “Neutron Jack” Welch or by Kushner, whose business plan for the Globe — a copy of which I obtained and wrote about in “Moguls” — was utterly unrealistic, depending on the same sort of unaffordable expansion that led to disaster in Southern California.
The praise that is now flowing for Connors is well deserved. He was, by all accounts, a kind and generous man. And I have one suggestion for the Globe. On June 3, 2007, the Sunday magazine published a terrific profile of Connors by then-business columnist Steve Bailey. You have to do a deep dive into the archives in order to find it. Why not republish it online?
I was intrigued to learn that embattled Washington Post publisher Will Lewis is thinking about expanding the Post’s local coverage as he seeks a way to turn around the paper’s declining fortunes. It’s an idea I’ve suggested a couple of times (here and here), so I’m heartened to see that the Post might actually move in that direction.
In Axios D.C., Cuneyt Dil reports that the product would be known as Local Plus and would be aimed at readers who are willing to pay a premium for newsletters and “exclusive experiences,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. If Lewis decides to head down that route, he’d be embracing the Post’s roots, harking back to a time when it had the highest penetration rate in the country and had more in common with large regional papers like The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer than with The New York Times.
Of course, Lewis doesn’t have to choose since digital distribution means that the Post can continue with the national and international mission that owner Jeff Bezos set for it a decade ago.
In my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” I tracked the Bezos led-transformation. Under the Graham family, from whom Bezos bought the paper in 2013, the Post was barely profitable and was accomplishing that mainly through cuts. The Grahams’ final play was to double down on local, unveiling the slogan “Of Washington, For Washington.”
Even in the early Bezos years, Post executives understood the value of local. For several years they offered two different digital products — a colorful, low-cost magazine-like app that contained no local news and that was aimed at a national audience, and a more traditional app that cost more and included all of the Post’s journalism, including local and regional coverage.
The Post’s major Bezos-era challenge has come since Donald Trump left the White House and a post-Trump-bump malaise hit multiple news outlets. The New York Times has been a notable exception, zooming to more than 10 million paid subscribers on the strength of its lifestyle offerings, including recipes, consumer advice and games. The Post, meanwhile, slid from 3 million to 2.5 million paid subscribers as of a year ago, and may have slipped more since then.
If the Post is going to start growing again, it has to find areas where it’s not competing head-to-head with the Times. I assume that’s what Lewis’ “third newsroom” comprising social media and lifestyle journalism comes in, although he hasn’t even begun to define what that will look like.
Local news, too, would be a smart move, and charging a premium for it makes a lot of sense.
I got to know Johanna when we were both Joan Shorenstein Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016. I wrote part of my book about a new breed of wealthy newspaper owners, “The Return of the Moguls.” Johanna wrote a paper that examined how mobile technology was actually contributing to the digital divide between rich and poor.
Dunaway recently received a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Fellows Program to further her work on local news. Among other things, she plans on building out an expansive database that lists local news outlets throughout the United States. She also plans to examine whether the nationalizing of news contributes to the toxic quality of public discourse.
I’ve got a Quick Take on what has been a bad year so far for public broadcasting operations, with cuts being imposed from Washington, D.C., to Denver and elsewhere. In Boston, where “What Works” is based, GBH News, the local news arm of the public media powerhouse GBH, has imposed some devastating cuts. But they’ve also brought in new leadership that could lead to a brighter future.
Ellen looks at a new use of print by the all-digital Texas Tribune, the nonprofit news outlet based in Austin.
I’m reading everything I can find about the still-unfolding story of what’s next at The Washington Post, and I think it makes sense to hold back until the picture comes more clearly into focus. Here, though, are a few bullet points of note:
• It sounds like Sally Buzbee could have stayed as executive editor, at least for a few months, if she’d been willing to accept the reduced role that publisher Will Lewis envisions under his three-newsrooms idea. New York Times reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson report that Buzbee told senior editors in advance of her departure, “I would have preferred to stay to help us get through this period, but it just got to the point where it wasn’t possible.”
• Lewis presided over a staff meeting Monday that devolved into a “shit show,” according to Matt Fuller and Tara Golshan of NOTUS. Particularly outspoken was political reporter Ashley Parker, who pointed out, “Now we have four white men running the newsroom.” Lewis responded, “I’ve got to do better.” Well, this was his chance, and now all the top jobs have been filled. NOTUS, by the way, is part of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, begun recently by Robert Allbritton, the former publisher of Politico, part of a family whose members are ancient rivals of the Post going back to the long-gone Washington Star.
• Check out this squishy-soft Post feature on the new top editors, Matt Murray and Robert Winnett. I don’t want to judge the Post on one article, and in fact this story on Buzbee’s departure is straightforward and reasonably tough. But I’m reminded of some of the brutally candid stories the Post produced after Jeff Bezos announced in August 2013 that he was buying the paper. As I wrote in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls”:
Indeed, within days of the announcement that he would buy the paper, the Post published an in-depth examination of Bezos and Amazon that could fairly be described as warts and all — he was described as “ruthless” and a “bully” in his dealings with competitors and a boss who was known for launching “tirades” that “humiliated colleagues.” An infamous story was repeated about Amazon stationing an ambulance outside one of its Pennsylvania warehouses during a heat wave rather than installing air conditioning…. Shel Kaphlan, Bezos’s first employee, who left Amazon after his role within the company was marginalized, was quoted as saying, “I saw him just completely destroy people on several occasions.” Kaphlan added that he felt “nauseous” at the prospect of Bezos owning the Post and the possibility that he would convert it “into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.” If there is an example of newspaper reporters’ sucking up to the new boss, well, this was surely its opposite.
As is his custom, Bezos refused to cooperate with the team of reporters who worked on that story. But the national investigative reporter Kimberly Kindy, who was among those journalists, told me there were no repercussions from Bezos after publication. “I don’t think that we have shied away from covering him. And he certainly has invited us to,” she said.
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Having tracked the rise of The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos, executive editor Marty Baron and chief technologist Shailesh Prakash in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” I’ve watched its dispiriting decline with sadness. On Sunday, that decline was underscored by Sally Buzbee’s departure as executive editor. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has the story.
Lest we forget, Bezos did not choose Baron and Prakash; rather, he inherited them from Graham family ownership after he bought the paper in 2013 for $250 million. And though Bezos had the good sense to keep them and give them the resources they needed, it was their vision that created a great digital, nationally focused news organization that was positioned perfectly for the rise of Trump. Maybe an early warning sign was that when Bezos did get to make a big hire, he chose Ronald Reagan apparatchik Fred Ryan as publisher. As Baron makes clear in his book “Collision of Power,” Ryan did not prove to be an inspired choice.
Since Donald Trump left office, it’s been nothing but a downhill slide for the Post, which, according to the new publisher, Will Lewis, lost $77 million last year and about half its audience since 2020. Was that entirely the fault of Buzbee, a former Associated Press executive editor who took the Post’s helm after Baron retired in early 2021? Of course not. But it all happened on her watch, so it’s not a surprise that she’s leaving.
As Poynter media reporter Tom Jones points out, it’s not 100% clear that Buzbee was fired. It’s possible that she decided she wanted nothing to do with Lewis’ recently articulated vision, which includes having “AI everywhere in our newsroom,” according to Semafor media reporter Max Tani. Ugh.
The new executive team sets off some alarm bells. Lewis is a former publisher of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal who reportedly was involved in helping Murdoch clean up his tabloids’ phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. a dozen years ago, according to David Folkenflik of NPR. Buzbee will be replaced on a temporary basis by Matt Murray, a former editor-in-chief of the Journal. After the 2024 election, Murray will slide over to a newly created position creating service and social media journalism while the main news product will be under the direction of Robert Winnett, currently deputy editor of The Telegraph Media Group, a right-wing news organization. Media critic Dan Gillmor wrote on Mastodon:
The Washington Post is about to lurch sharply to the right politically as former Murdoch apparatchik solidifies his grip on the organization. Current editor Buzbee is out, and he’s bringing in people from Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph (right-wing UK news org).
I’m willing to wait and see, in part because The Wall Street Journal remains a great newspaper notwithstanding its editorial page, whose right-wing orientation precedes Murdoch’s ownership. I’m deeply concerned about what Lewis has in mind with his artificial intelligence initiative, though.
For the second time since he bought it in 2013, Jeff Bezos is faced with the challenge of reinventing The Washington Post. He succeeded spectacularly the first time, with years of growth, profitability and influence. This time, though, he’s doing it with people he chose himself — and there are caution signs all over the place.
• Catch and kill. The National Enquirer’s practice of paying for stories and of deep-sixing articles in order to gain power and influence over someone — known as “catch and kill” — didn’t start with former Enquirer owner David Pecker. Nor was Donald Trump the first alleged beneficiary. I recommend “Scandalous,” a 2019 documentary about the Enquirer that is revealing and highly entertaining. Both Bob Hope and Bill Cosby were caught dead to rights in tawdry sexual affairs, and the Enquirer killed stories about those affairs in order to force them to cooperative in cheery feature stories. Pecker’s innovation was to politicize the practice.
• Facebook and news. Back when I was reporting my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” news organizations desperately sought to use Facebook as a way of distributing their journalism. News publishers liked to talk about “the barbell,” by which they would attract readers on Facebook (one end of the barbell) and try to get them to migrate to their own digital products (the other end of the barbell), where, it was hoped, they would become paying subscribers.
In the years since, Meta executives have decided news just isn’t worth it and have throttled journalism on Facebook and other products, including Threads and Instagram. How bad is it? The Washington Post has conducted a data analysis (free link) showing that “the 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook” between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024. It’s further evidence that news organizations’ business models shouldn’t be dependent on giant corporations with their own agendas.
• The WSJ will miss Murdoch. Axel Springer, the right-wing German media conglomerate that took over Politico in 2021, has its sights set on The Wall Street Journal, according to Ben Smith of Semafor. Rupert Murdoch, through his control of the Fox News Channel and other outlets on three continents, may be the most malignant media magnate on the planet. But he’s been a surprisingly good steward of the Journal, which after 17 years of his ownership remains one of our great newspapers. At 93, he won’t be in charge too much longer. And here’s a quote from Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner that you might enjoy: “I’m all for climate change. We shouldn’t fight climate change but adjust to it.”
I’ll grant you that’s something you might see on the Journal’s editorial page even now. Murdoch, though, has been better about not letting that bleed into the news pages than Axel Springer might be.
The New York Times last week published a story by David Streitfeld on Roger Fidler, a digital journalism visionary who touted the idea of delivering news via tablet computers a good 20 years before such devices were even available. I wrote about Fidler in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking News for the Twenty-First Century.” An excerpt follows. It’s fascinating to look back at what Fidler got right and got wrong.
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In the early 1990s, a Knight Ridder executive named Roger Fidler developed an idea that was stunningly close to the tablets and smartphones of the 2010s. I attended a conference at Columbia University at which Fidler outlined his vision for a digital tablet on which we would read newspapers and magazines — something he had been thinking about for the previous dozen or so years. The screen would have the same resolution as a glossy magazine; the devices would be flexible so you could roll one up and take it with you; and they would be so cheap that newspapers would give them away to eliminate the money-burning tasks of printing and distribution. How far ahead of his time was Fidler? Even as of 2017, we were nowhere near achieving any of those three goals.
Fidler also anticipated the choice and interactivity that would come with digital newspapers. For instance, he said that a subscriber might purchase a subscription to The New York Times’s international news, The Washington Post’s political news and her local paper’s regional news. And the tablet would have interactive capabilities so that you could, for instance, click on a restaurant ad to make a reservation. “It was not quite like Roger had descended from another planet, but he was saying some things that were simply very hard to believe at the time,” John Woolley, who worked with Fidler, said in 2012. “He had conjured up this idea of a tablet at a time when laptops were revolutionary. He was clearly a futurist. And he didn’t care what anyone believed. He never backed down.”
I have no notes from that conference, so I’m relying largely on my memory, as well as a video that Fidler put together when he was head of the Knight Ridder Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The prototype in the video was simultaneously retro in that the display looked exactly like a printed newspaper and futuristic in its capabilities, which included better, faster interactive graphics than we generally see today as well as sophisticated voice controls.
But keep in mind Marshall McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is the message. Fidler envisioned a revolutionary leap forward in the way we interact with text, photography, graphics, audio and video. What he did not envision was that the digital future would be altogether different from what had come before and that we would use it in ways he could not imagine. In his talk at Columbia, he said that we’d download the content we had paid for by plugging our devices into, say, our cable television box before going to bed. In the video, he also raised the possibility of something that looked like a credit card that you could take with you and use to load more content onto your device if you were away from home. What he missed was that digital newspapers would be distributed via the open web rather than a closed system controlled by publishers. Fidler could see into the future in ways that were remarkable. But in 1994, he did not mention what would turn out to be the most revolutionary change of all. Even though he brilliantly anticipated the technological revolution that was to come, he failed to foresee the cultural revolution that would accompany it.
“For most people a newspaper’s like a friend,” Fidler says in the video. “It’s somebody you know who you have come to trust. Over the last 15 years there have been many attempts to develop electronic newspapers, and many of the technologists who have been pursuing these objectives assume that information is simply a commodity, and people really don’t care where that information comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I disagree with that view.”
In fact, Fidler was wrong. Most news turned out to be so generic that it is difficult to imagine anyone would ever pay for it. As I am wrapping up this chapter in late March 2017, one of the big news stories of the day is the fate of President Donald Trump’s tax proposals following the Republican Congress’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a major plank in Trump’s platform. Entering “Trump taxes” at Google News brings more than 7.3 million results — the very definition of commodity news. More than 20 years after the narrator of Fidler’s video assured viewers that people wanted “a specific newspaper with a branded identity,” there are very few types of content that readers might be persuaded to pay for: certain types of local and investigative stories that no other news organizations are publishing; personalities that distinguish a paper from its competitors, such as popular columnists; and the intelligent judgment of editors regarding what news is the most important, what’s less important, and what can be left out of the paper altogether.
