By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag: The Return of the Moguls Page 1 of 4

Roger Fidler predicted the future of news delivery. But he missed a crucial piece.

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.

***

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.

Leave a comment | Read comments

How the NY Times over-interprets its reporting about billionaire media owners

Jeff Bezos. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

The New York Times has published a story (free link) that calls into question the rise of billionaires who own news organizations, noting that The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the Los Angeles Times under Patrick Soon-Shiong and Time magazine under Marc Benioff are all losing money. True enough. My problem with the story is that reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson try too hard to impose an ubertake when in fact there’s important background with each of those examples. Mullin and Robertson write:

All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.

But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.

The role of wealthy newspaper owners is something of ongoing interest to me. My last book, “The Return of the Moguls” (2018), focused on the Post, The Boston Globe and the Orange County Register in Southern California, owned by a rich Boston-area businessman named Aaron Kushner. At the time the book came out, the Post was flying high, the Globe was muddling along and the Register was failing; it eventually fell into the hands of the slash-and-burn hedge fund Alden Globe Capital. The Post’s and the Globe’s fortunes have since moved in opposite directions.

Here are the particulars that get glossed over in Mullin and Robertson’s attempt to impose an overarching framework:

• Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, made deep investments in technology and built up the staff. The result was years of growth and profits, which only came sputtering to a halt after Donald Trump left the White House. Former executive editor Marty Baron, in his book “Collision of Power,” suggests that, over time, a disciplined approach to hiring became more lax. In other words, the Post got ahead of itself and is now in the midst of a reset. A new publisher, William Lewis, begins work this month, and we’ll see if he can articulate a strategy that amounts to more than “just like the Times only not as comprehensive.”

• Benioff bought a dog and, predictably, it’s going “woof woof.” Time was the largest of the Big Three newsweeklies, along with Newsweek and U.S. World & News Report; it’s also the only one of the three that still exists in a somewhat recognizable form. Newsweeklies succeeded because, pre-internet, you couldn’t get great national papers like the Times, the Post and The Wall Street Journal delivered to your doorstep. Not only is there no discernible reason for them to exist anymore, but the leading newsweekly these days, at least in terms of cachet, is The Economist.

• Not all billionaire owners are in it for the right reasons, and Soon-Shiong has proven to be an uncertain leader. Does he care about the Los Angeles Times or not? He’s built it up; now he’s tearing it down. He recently pushed out his executive editor, Kevin Merida, the most prominent Black editor in the country, and he’s done some truly awful things such as delivering Tribune Publishing’s papers to Alden Global Capital and more recently selling The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden.

So what does that tell us about billionaire owners? Not much. As Mullin and Robertson acknowledge, some are doing just fine, including The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry and The Atlantic under Laurene Powell Jobs. They could have also mentioned the Star Tribune of Minneapolis under Glen Taylor or, for that matter, The New York Times, a publicly traded company that is nevertheless under the tight control of the Sulzberger family. I don’t think the Sulzbergers are billionaires, but they are not poor.

At the moment, it seems that the only two viable models for large regional dailies is individual ownership by wealthy people who are willing to invest in future profitability and nonprofit ownership, either in the form of a nonprofit organization owning a for-profit paper, as with The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Bay Times, or a paper that goes fully nonprofit, as with The Salt Lake Tribune and The Baltimore Banner. The Banner is a digital startup that nevertheless is attempting to position itself as a comprehensive replacement for The Baltimore Sun. The Sun, in turn, was one of the Tribune papers that Soon-Shiong helped gift-wrap for Alden, and just this past week was sold to right-wing television executive David Smith.

Leave a comment | Read comments

The late Joe O’Donnell was once part of a group that wanted to buy the Globe

There’s a small omission in The Boston Globe’s obituary of Joe O’Donnell. Bryan Marquard writes that O’Donnell was part of a group that once tried to buy the Red Sox, a prize that was ultimately won by John Henry. What the story doesn’t mention, though, was that O’Donnell also tried to buy the Globe itself. I made mention of it in 2007 in an article I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine, writing that there had been some talk the previous fall that the New York Times Co. might be getting ready to offload the Globe:

The speculation briefly reached a fever pitch last fall, when retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, advertising executive Jack Connors, and concession mogul Joseph O’Donnell spread the word that they would like to buy the Globe. But with Times Company chief executive Janet Robinson all but coming right out and saying the Globe is not for sale, talk of a Welch-led sale has died down.

Two years later, the Times Co. did try to sell the Globe, only to pull it off the market when it apparently couldn’t get the price it wanted. Then, in 2013, the Times finally sold the Globe to none other than John Henry, O’Donnell’s rival in the Red Sox sweepstakes. In my book “The Return of the Moguls,” I wrote that Connors was among the suitors who competed with Henry for the Globe; I did not record whether O’Donnell was part of that second Connors bid.

Leave a comment | Read comments

A possible way forward for The Washington Post: Go local

Photo (cc) 2013 by Esther Vargas

Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts about the state of the media business and why there were so many layoffs in 2023 at high-profile news organizations like BuzzFeed (which closed its news division), NPR and Vox Media. There is very little new in his observations, but I was interested to see that he’s complaining about The Washington Post’s local coverage under Jeff Bezos. Yglesias writes:

What has bothered me, personally, about Bezos’ stewardship of the Post is that through the process of first growing and then shrinking the newsroom, he’s left coverage of local issues worse off than it was before. His aspiration upon taking over was to make the Post a “national and even global publication,” and during the growth years, his investment priorities reflected that. Perry Stein used to cover DC Public Schools, and I think DC residents with school-aged children really appreciated her work. But when she got a promotion, it wasn’t to do something bigger covering DC government or regional issues, it was to cover the Justice Department, where she’s churning out Trump trial stories.

When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” the paper was in the midst of an enormous growth curve, briefly shooting ahead of The New York Times in digital traffic and consistently earning profits. Bezos’ vision of reinventing the Post as a national digital publication — leaving behind the Graham family’s “Of Washington, For Washington” marketing pitch — was a huge success. But the paper has not done well since Trump left the presidency, and is now losing money and circulation.

As Yglesias writes, and as I’ve written on several occasions, the Post’s current position as being pretty much like the Times only not as comprehensive just isn’t tenable in the long run. One thing it could do is reposition itself as being “of Washington, for Washington” while at the same time maintaining its commitment to national and international news. During the early Bezos years, the Post actually offered two digital editions. One included all of the Post’s journalism; the other was a cheaper, more colorful product that omitted local news and that was aimed at the national market. Clearly there were people at the Post back then who knew they could charge a premium for local. Why not embrace that again?

Leave a comment | Read comments

Marty Baron on Trump, the media and the original meaning of objectivity

Marty Baron, right, with then-Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Knight Foundation.

I downloaded Martin Baron’s book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” on the first day that it became available. I expect it’s going to take me a while to read it, but I plan to review it once I’ve made my way through its 576 pages. The Post under Bezos and Baron comprise the longest section of my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” although — since it ends with Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory — I did not cover how the Post navigated the Trump presidency.

Based on what others are writing, and on interviews that Baron is giving during the early days of his book tour, it sounds like journalistic objectivity is a major theme of “Collision of Power.” Baron has written and talked about this before, as he did in an address this past spring at Brandeis University. And what his critics don’t give him enough credit for is that he subscribes to the proper view of objectivity defined by Walter Lippmann more than a century ago.

In Baron’s view, like Lippmann’s, objectivity is the fair-minded pursuit of the truth, not both-sides-ism, not quoting a variety of views and leaving it up to the poor reader or viewer or listener to figure it out. For instance, here’s Baron’s answer when he was asked by CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy about how good a job the press is doing in its coverage of the Republican Party’s meltdown into lunacy and authoritarianism:

I think the coverage of the latest chaos has been very good, based on what I’ve read. It portrays the Republican Party as Chaos Central, which it is. The party is proving to be ungovernable, and that is wreaking havoc on the country as a whole. The bigger issue is Trump. I’d like to see substantially more coverage of what a second Trump administration would do upon taking office. Who would be put in cabinet posts? Who would be put in charge of regulatory agencies?

No doubt Trump would embark on an immediate campaign of vengeance. Plans are already in the works. What would that mean for the FBI, DOJ, the courts, the press — really for all the institutional pillars of our democracy? Some stories have been produced, though not enough in my view. Those sorts of stories would serve the public better than yet-another interview with Trump himself. Look, the party that now levels evidence-free charges of “weaponization” of government openly boasts of how it would weaponize government against its perceived enemies.

I don’t want to copy and paste all of Darcy’s interview, so I’ll leave it at that. But do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Baron touches on several other important topics, including Fox News, artificial intelligence and X/Twitter, and he’s got smart things to say about all of them.

Meanwhile, here’s a surprise: The Washington Post has published a long feature by former Post reporter Wesley Lowery on the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, 109-year-old Viola Fletcher. Lowery, who’s now based at American University, left the Post in 2020 after he and Baron clashed over Lowery’s provocative tweets. It never should have come to that; Lowery, a gifted journalist, was essential for his coverage of the first Black Lives Matter movement and helped the Post win a Pulitzer Prize for its data journalism project tracking police shootings of civilians. My media ethics students are reading Lowery’s new book, “American Whitelash,” this spring.

Leave a comment | Read comments

Marty Baron’s forthcoming book on Bezos and the Post gets a boost from Kirkus

The first review of Marty Baron’s forthcoming book is out, and I’m relieved. According to Kirkus Reviews, The Washington Post that Baron describes in “Collision of Power” is the same one I saw on display when I was visiting the Post and conducting interviews — including with Baron — in 2015 and ’16.

In “The Return of the Moguls,” I wrote about a news organization that had been reinvigorated by new owner Jeff Bezos (by his money, of course, but also by his energetic work on the consumer and technology side) and executive editor Baron, whose staff was relentless in exposing the truth about then-candidate Donald Trump’s fraudulent charity and, later, the existence of a tape on which he’s heard boasting about sexual assault. Most important, Bezos was described by everyone, including Baron, as respecting the independence of the newsroom and not interfering with editorial decisions.

So why am I relieved? Although it seemed unlikely, I harbored some worry that Baron was being overly diplomatic with me, and that now, after he’s retired from the Post, he was going to tell the world what it was really like to work for Bezos. The  Kirkus review, though, makes it clear that there’s little distance between what Baron told me and what he’s written in “Collision of Power,” subtitled “Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.” According to Kirkus:

Although focused on metrics and finances, Bezos staunchly supported editorial independence and journalistic integrity, a stance that put him on a collision course with Donald Trump, who expected Bezos to rein in the Post’s coverage of him and his administration. When that did not happen, he unleashed the “raw abuse of power” for which he was notorious.

The review concludes that Baron has written “an impassioned argument for objective journalism.” This is going to prove controversial at a time when objectivity is under attack. But in an address at Brandeis University earlier this year, Baron defined objectivity in its truest, most Lippmann-esque form. It is, at its best, fair-minded, independent truth-seeking. It’s not quoting “both sides” and letting the poor reader try to figure it out.

“The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible,” Baron said at Brandeis. “It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.”

I’m not sure whether Baron would agree, but I’m going to take it a step further and argue that even opinion journalism can be objective if it’s undertaken in the right spirit. I tell my students that if they’re producing an opinion piece, they need to acknowledge differing views and inconvenient facts and address them. If they do that, then they’re being objective. After all, Walter Lippmann himself worked the opinion side of the street for most of his career.

Baron’s book comes out Oct. 3.

There he goes again: Patrick Soon-Shiong delivers another paper to Alden Global Capital

Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy surgeon who owns the Los Angeles Times, has delivered yet another daily newspaper into the greedy hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Soon-Shiong announced Monday that he’d sell The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden’s MediaNews Group. By my count, the Union-Tribune becomes the 10th paper that Soon-Shiong has helped turn over to Alden. As Sara Fischer and Andrew Keatts report for Axios, the new owners immediately announced cuts to the newsroom.

When Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018, the Union-Tribune was thrown in as part of the deal. Soon-Shiong was hailed by optimistic media observers as someone who, like Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post and John Henry at The Boston Globe, would provide his papers with the runway they needed to become self-sustaining enterprises.

Please consider supporting this free source of news and commentary for just $5 a month. You can sign up here.

It’s been a mixed bag. Soon-Shiong’s main interest has been the LA Times, but he’s gone back and forth between investing and cutting. By no means has the Times been hollowed out as if it had been owned by, oh, let’s just say Alden Global Capital. But he’s run a lean ship, with the Times announcing just a few days ago that the recent sale of its press meant that game stories, box scores and standings would be eliminated from its print edition, according to Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing.

Selling off the San Diego paper to one of the worst possible buyers is reminiscent of John Henry’s decision to sell the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to a Florida chain back in 2014. As I recount in my book “The Return of the Moguls,” folks at the T&G thought Henry had promised not to sell unless a local buyer could be found; Henry told me his only promise had been not to sell to GateHouse Media. In any case, GateHouse managed to acquire the T&G within months and immediately began hollowing it out. GateHouse later morphed into Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain with about 200 dailies, which is notorious for its cost-cutting.

Alden Global Capital’s two newspaper chains, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, make it the second largest owner with about 100 dailies. Alden is often described as the worst newspaper owner in the country, denounced as “vulture capitalists” who slash news coverage and sell off real estate in an attempt to squeeze out as much revenue as possible. Locally, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

Soon-Shiong was perhaps the central player in Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing. Whereas MediaNews Group comprises mainly smaller papers, plus a few large dailies such as The Denver Post, Tribune owns eight of the largest, most iconic papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and, closer to home, the Hartford Courant.

In the spring of 2021, Tribune, then comprising nine papers, was up for grabs, as it had been many times before. Stewart Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, was attempting to buy the chain and sell off some of its properties to what he hoped would be public-spirited local owners. His main interest was in saving the Sun. Also bidding for the papers Alden. The hedge fund actually offered less money than Bainum, but its offer was reportedly less complicated as well.

The Tribune board ended up voting to sell the papers to Alden — a move that could have been halted by just one board member. Soon-Shiong, who was on the board, abstained, and he did so in a way that mean his vote essentially counted as a yes. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Soon-Shiong submitted his ballot without having checked the “abstain” box; if he had, his vote would have been counted as a “no.”

Bainum went on to found the nonprofit Baltimore Banner. Tribune, meanwhile, spun off one of its most prominent papers, the Daily News of New York, which remains part of the Alden empire as a separately owned entity.

So what’s next for The San Diego Union-Tribune? Nothing good, you can be sure. Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news site, headlined its story “LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop.’” Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis interviewed the news-business analyst Ken Doctor, who predicted that San Diego will not be rid of Alden anytime soon.

“People get confused because these people are cut-throat capitalists,” Doctor told them. “But their papers are making money and they’re holding onto them for the time being.”

Former Globe president Vinay Mehra sues, alleging the Henrys owe him $12 million

Vinay Mehra (via LinkedIn)

Former Boston Globe Media Partners (BGMP) president Vinay Mehra has filed an explosive lawsuit against the company, charging that he was fired in 2020 because Globe owners John and Linda Henry didn’t want to pay him the commissions and other compensation he’d earned for transforming the newspaper into a profitable operation. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has all the details as well as a copy of the suit.

Mehra was hired in 2017 from Politico, where he was executive vice president and chief financial officer. Before that, he worked as chief financial officer at GBH in Boston from 2008 to 2015.

According to the lawsuit, BGMP owes Mehra more than $12 million in lost commissions, wages and other compensation. Gaffin writes:

In his suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Mehra charges that despite returning the Globe to profitability, John Henry and his corporate minions decided to cheap out — and then ousted him after threatening and lying about him with an unquenchable “thirst for vengeance” sending him a termination letter alleging “fraud, misappropriation, embezzlement or acts of similar dishonesty.”…

At this point we’re only getting one side of the story, as BGMP has not yet filed a response. But if Mehra’s numbers are accurate, then the lawsuit provides some insight into how the Globe transformed itself into one of the country’s most financially successful large regional newspapers. In 2019, for instance, Mehra claims that the Globe implemented $10 million in cuts “through a combination of targeted layoffs, reduction in vendor costs, reduction in distribution costs, and other measures.”

The result, Mehra claims, was a turnaround from a money-losing operation to one that was enjoying a positive cash flow of “tens of millions of dollars” by the time he left. Indeed, it was at the end of 2018 that John Henry told me, unexpectedly, that the Globe had achieved profitability. “As our digital growth continues the sustainability of a vibrant Boston Globe is coming into view,” he said at that time. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Mehra apparently expects BGMP to flesh out its accusations of fraud and embezzlement as the case moves forward, as he offers some details in what might be regarded as a pre-emptive strike. The lawsuit also includes a statement that I suspect former Globe editor Brian McGrory might disagree with: “He [Mehra] also shifted the focus of the Globe’s reporting to be more strategic, to prioritize the Globe’s strengths, and to drive viewership.”

That sounds a lot like McGrory’s January 2017 memo to the staff in which he talked about repositioning the Globe’s coverage, which I wrote about in “The Return of the Moguls”:

The most important takeaway was that the Globe would no longer attempt to be a “paper of record,” publishing obligatory stories about the minutiae of city and state government, the courts, and the like. Rather, it would seek to become an “organization of interest,” developing enterprise stories out of those traditional areas of coverage that made more of a difference to readers’ lives.

But Mehra didn’t join BGMP until six months after McGrory wrote that memo. No doubt he and McGrory had conversations about how to make the Globe more compelling to its audience. The shift in focus that the lawsuit talks about, though, had already taken place, and in any case fell under the purview of the editor, not the president.

It will be interesting to see how the Globe responds — and, of course, whether this goes to trial or is instead settled out of court.

The Fred Ryan era at the Post had run its course. Killing Launcher proved it.

Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy

Back in January, The Washington Post was struggling, and publisher Fred Ryan had some difficult decisions to make. What he chose was to eliminate 20 newsroom positions and leave another 30 openings unfilled. Oh, and there was this: He decided (or, at the very least, agreed) to phase out Launcher, a Post vertical devoted to covering video games, and lay off the site’s five staff members.

At a time when the Post was fighting for ways to differentiate itself from its larger rival, The New York Times, Launcher should have been considered a key part of that strategy. Gaming is the largest entertainment medium, larger than movies and music combined. And Launcher was doing well. As editor Mike Hume tweeted, the move was “sad, upsetting, and perhaps most of all, mindboggling,” adding that Launcher had drawn “tens of millions of users, the majority first-time readers of The Post and almost all of them under the age of 40.”

Kat Bailey put it this way at IGN:

In the video game world, Launcher made a name for itself as a high-quality games media site with a focus on first-rate reporting, often taking the lead on difficult stories beyond the scope of the traditional enthusiast press. It stood out as one of the few examples of serious games reporting in a legacy newspaper, often landing major interviews and exclusives as a result.

It’s been obvious for quite some time that the Post needs a major reset. After years of growth, profits and what owner Jeff Bezos once called “swagger,” the paper has been stumbling since Donald Trump left the White House. Paid digital subscriptions are down from about 3 million to about 2.5 million, traffic to its website is on the wane, and the paper is losing money.

So it may have been met with a huge sigh of relief when Ryan announced Monday that he was stepping down as publisher and CEO. “I’m deeply grateful to Fred for his leadership and for the friendship that we’ve developed over the years,” Bezos wrote, according to an account of Ryan’s departure in The Wall Street Journal. Ryan told the staff in a note: “Together, we have accomplished one of the most extraordinary transformations in modern media history. We have evolved from a primarily local print newspaper to become a global digital publication.”

I didn’t interview Ryan when I was reporting on the Post’s revival in 2015 and ’16 for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” (I didn’t interview Bezos, either, but that’s a long story involving emails, snail mail and phone calls. Suffice to say he doesn’t give interviews to anyone, even the Post.) I spoke with then-executive editor Marty Baron and then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash, who were leading the Post’s revival. I made a few attempts to connect with Ryan, but it didn’t happen. In any case, Baron and Prakash were the ones who were doing the transformational work.

So I was fascinated with Charlotte Klein’s account of the Post’s decline in Vanity Fair earlier this year. Bezos had paid a rare visit to the Post, and everyone was wondering what it all meant. At the time, it seemed like Ryan was feeling empowered with legends like Baron and Prakash having moved on. There was even talk that Baron’s replacement, Sally Buzbee, was musing with her inner circle that she might leave if Ryan didn’t stay in his lane. But in reporting on Ryan’s departure Monday, Klein writes that Buzbee had smoothed things over in recent months even as Bezos has been a more visible presence.

“Bezos, I’m told, has brought refreshing candor to the discussions, in which he’s asked about things like the Post’s paywall strategy and, notably, plan for growing subscriptions,” Klein writes. “At times, he sharply questioned Ryan, one of the sources said.”

For now, the Post will be led by an interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The way forward is not clear at all. Being just like the Times, only smaller and not as good, is not a business strategy. The Post is still a great newspaper, rivaled only by the Times and The Wall Street Journal. But it needs to find its own identify, as the Journal has with an emphasis on business news and a right-wing editorial page. (I’m not suggesting that the Post emulate the Journal’s opinion section; the Post’s is bad enough already.)

More than anything, the Post needs to identify coverage areas that the Times has ignored and doesn’t seem to be interested in. Like, you know, video games. Did I mention that it’s the largest entertainment medium in the country, and that Launcher was bringing in tens of millions of young readers before the Post decided to shut it down? Yes. Yes, I did.

Maine publisher Reade Brower says he’s ready to move on. So what comes next?

Portland Harbor. Photo (cc) 2021 by Paul VanDerWerf.

Maine newspaper publisher Reade Brower is getting ready to move on. Michael Shepherd and Lori Valigra of the Bangor Daily News, the only daily in Maine that Brower doesn’t own, reported on Thursday that the publisher is seeking to wind down his stewardship of the Portland Press Herald, four other daily papers and a number of weeklies.

In a follow-up by the Press Herald’s Eric Russell, Brower sounded like he isn’t in any hurry, and that he was not yet sure what the transition might look like. Brower put it this way in a memo to the staff:

The truth is I am beginning the search for what’s next, whether that be a new steward or perhaps partners willing to join me in carrying the torch. We are watching new ownership models emerge across the country from B-corporations to nonprofit efforts. Transparency has always been a pillar of journalism, and it’s important to me personally. That said, people will speculate because it is human nature. Over the past couple of years, I have been approached and looked at different pathways for the future but did not pull the trigger — either I wasn’t ready, I still felt my job was not completed, or the path just didn’t feel right.

A B-corporation is another name for a public benefit corporation — for-profit that is under no obligation to maximize earnings, allowing revenues to be reinvested in the mission. In the news world, some well-known B-corps include The Colorado Sun, Lookout Santa Cruz and, closer to home, The Provincetown Independent.

Brower, by all accounts, has been a decent steward of his Maine properties. More important, he’s kept the national chains out of the state, and he may well have outlasted them. Gannett is getting rid of papers, as Sarah Fischer of Axios observes, so it would be unlikely that the company would bring its special brand of looting and pillaging newsrooms to Portland The hedge fund Alden Global Capital hasn’t acquired anything for quite a while, so perhaps we can hope that its executives are content with their current holdings. As I told Russell, “Whether this has a happy ending or not depends on who steps forward as buyer.” If Brower’s memo is any indication, he cares about his legacy.

Brower came in after a tumultuous period at the Press Herald, which I recounted in my book “The Return of the Moguls.” In 2008, the paper’s then-owner, The Seattle Times, sold it to a businessman named Richard Connor, who promptly ran it into a ditch. Four years later, the paper was nearly sold to Aaron Kushner, a wealthy Boston-area tech entrepreneur who had previously been spurned in his bid to purchase The Boston Globe.

Union leaders at the Press Herald rebelled at Kushner’s demand for concessions. Kushner moved on, buying the Orange County Register in Southern California and steering it into bankruptcy after a massive, ill-advised expansion failed to produce the revenues he was hoping for. The Press Herald’s fortunes, meanwhile, began to improve. First, billionaire Donald Sussman stepped forward and ran the paper for a few years. Then, in 2015, Sussman was succeeded by Brower, a printer who lacked Sussman’s deep pockets but who cared about news coverage and kept cuts to a minimum.

The Press Herald and its affiliated newspapers have a reputation for doing things the right way, and Brower surely deserves credit for that. I hope this week’s news means the continuation of what he has accomplished — and not the beginning of the end.

 

Page 1 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén