I can't see where the article defines how it measures "productivity". Is it just words produced per hour?
Journalism is, I imagine, much like programming: a lot of the words are "boilerplate" and cheap to produce, but those aren't the important parts of a story. Some of the words require a lot of work. Getting a direct quote from a relevant person. Doing the deep research to expose a claim as false instead of blindly parroting it. Getting multiple sources to voice contrasting views on a topic. Fact checking an article before publication.
I worry that whatever their definition of "productivity" is, it ignores these important yet time consuming aspects, and as such, what looks like "increased productivity" in their metrics is really just a decrease in quality.
The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change. On the other hand, Blue Origin reportedly loses multiple billions of $ per year, and has done for decades, which Bezos pumps in without insisting on massive cuts or layoffs.
> The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change.
You don't even "might understand" this, because you're intelligent enough to grasp that its profitability as a newspaper was never a factor in Bezos' desire to purchase the WP.
There is quite a bit of difference between not making a profit and consistently losing around $100m a year with apparently no path to at least revenue neutrality.
So it loses pocket change for a multi billionaire?
Edit: The consideration being that perhaps billionaire toys need not be profitable per se, but are purchased for different reasons. Twitter is another example here.
That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.
In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.
Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.
Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.
The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.
BO definitely does layoffs, and is run just as awfully as Amazon (look who the CEO of BO is as of 2024). Doesn’t matter if you’re in an office or on the manufacturing floor, the hours and demands are terrible there. Everyone I know that has worked there echoed the same problems that Amazon had.
So it's a cost center. Exactly like the public relations tool that WP is. Until due to cuts public loses interest in it, at which point it ceases to be an effective tool and keeps being only a cost center.
Rich businessmen have expensive hobbies, and those can look a lot like real businesses. Jeff could also buy a couple oceanographic research vessels tomorrow, spend a few years looking for sunken Spanish treasure ships, then get bored and sell the whole "business" in a liquidation auction.
Yes, Jeff and his companies keep making idealistic, pro-social statements. Unfortunately, such statements are little more than socially mandated lies. Which millions of people really want to believe - so be cautious about calling them out.
The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
Wikipedia says it "had the highest opening for a non-concert documentary since the $10.7 million opening for Chimpanzee (2012)".
It did well by documentary standards, poorly compared to its budget, and the stories about empty theaters are mostly in areas with very weak Trump support. Those stories spread mainly because they makes us feel good.
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
Jeffy wants to have his cake and eat it, too; a propaganda apparatus that turns a profit. The obvious solution would be to not own a spin machine if it's not turning a profit if you're looking to make money. But of course that would leave him without a mouthpiece.
I also wonder how much having his name attached to the thing is responsible for the awful balance sheet ca 2024. It may never turn a profit as long as it's a known Bezos operation.
Simple solution: quantify the value of the propaganda and add that to the Post's balance sheet. Problem then is that the worker bees might decide they should get a slice of that value, which would offend Jeff's core sensibilities.
It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” he announced Wednesday, leading to editorial page editor David Shipley’s resignation."[1]
> It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets"
That's about as uncharitable a take as you can possibly get. Bezos pushed the paper's editorial slant toward libertarian, and Shipley didn't like it, because it didn't fit his own political ideals. You could just as easily say Shipley was propagandizing a different philosophy before the change, it wasn't selling to the paper's target audience, and Bezos fixed the problem.
Regardless, editorial writers do not have a deity-given right to espouse their political opinions while collecting a paycheck -- particularly when their opinions aren't selling product. This goes all the way back to the very first news broadsheets. Throughout US history, newspapers have switched political philosophy as business needs dictated.
> I like that you say that the opinion you quoted is uncharitable and then agree with it.
To people who disagree with you, your opinion is always trivially dismissed as "propaganda". This is neither insightful nor charitable, and applies universally to actors on any side of a political debate.
It kind of seems like you’re either arguing that there’s no such thing as propaganda, or that if a thing bothers someone then it can’t be propaganda.
If mandating an entire section of a national newspaper only write things that align with specific, prescribed values doesn’t rise to the definition of creating propaganda, nothing does.
> If mandating an entire section of a national newspaper only write things that align with specific, prescribed values doesn’t rise to the definition of creating propaganda, nothing does.
Well, OK. If you want to call the New York Times opinion section "propaganda", then I guess I can't argue.
This is a thread where we are discussing Jeff Bezos mandating the opinions in the opinions section of the Washington Post. Is “I have imagined your opinion about a different thing that we aren’t talking about!” supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
You called the Washington Post opinions section propaganda in another post. You seem to keep agreeing with the people that you’re responding to in a tone that sounds like you’re not agreeing with them.
It seems like we all agree about Jeff Bezos turning the options section into his own personal propaganda outlet and you just want to add that you think other folks are angry? And you want us to know that you’re imagining our opinions about other stuff?
> This is a thread where we are discussing Jeff Bezos mandating the opinions in the opinions section of the Washington Post.
No, "we" are not doing that. You are asserting this, and I am saying that you are confusing the completely historically normal function of a newspaper editorial staff with "propaganda". Newspaper owners have, since newspapers have existed, controlled the editorial slants of their papers.
The New York Times does similar things regularly -- but on the left -- and James Bennet famously was pushed out from the Times in 2020 for having the temerity to publish an editorial from a sitting US Senator, because that Senator said something right-wing, and AG Sulzberger (chairman of the Times) demanded his resignation for it.
> Propaganda as opposed to information (what one would naively expect from a newspaper).
> While a regular newspaper article would inform, propaganda would deceive with the intention of convincing people of some idea
We're talking about the opinion section. The editorial board writes opinions. You're fundamentally just upset that they switched from writing about opinions you prefer, to ones that you don't like, but they've always been engaged in what you're characterizing as propaganda.
As far as I can tell, "left wing" or "leftist" mostly doesn't refer to any coherent ideology or group of people, so much as acting as a catch-all term for things the ruling class doesn't like or people who they'd prefer not to have a voice in media
Yea except when everything that happens is the fault of "leftists" because they didn't vote for the same candidate, or maybe did but had some critiques of them. Sometimes "leftists" include anyone who has ever voted for a democrat, sometimes "the left" is only the people who dislike the mainstream of the democratic or labor or CDU or insert electorally-viable party here and of course then anything bad that happens to them is the fault of "the left". Sometimes "leftists" are weak and have no sense of reality and can't possibly accomplish anything in the real world, but sometimes "the left" is an omnipresent cabal that secretly rules society and can destroy the careers of celebrities. Who exactly this consists of, what their interests are, what real organizations represent those interests, and even what they want seems to vary a lot based on who you're asking and what point they're trying to make today
Also of course if you're one of "those people" - some sort of minority or a woman or something - and don't loudly say conspicuously jingoistic shit that throws most other people that share your aberration under the bus, people will often assume you're a radical leftist. Unless of course radical leftists are the actual cause of your problems in some hypothetical argument being presented to you unprompted by someone who heard it on a podcast. The left is everyone and the left is no one
> Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled
Sort of like Moore's Law. If he can do that every 18 months then in a few decades the newsroom will really fly! News flash: it doesn't work like that. :(
It is like a guy seeing headlines "wapo is losing" money and feeling ashamed in its "genius entrepreneur's ego / could never be wrong" and taking revenge on whoever he can take revenge and inflict pain just for the sake of it.
That's not just WaPo. That's the newspaper business. The business model for newspapers just doesn't work anymore, and they've all been trying to come to terms with it since Craigslist launched in 1995.
Why doesn't he sell while he can still get something for it? Continuing the trajectory it has been on in the last two years will mean shuddering the paper or turning it into X hoping some users will switch.
Newspapers just aren't worth that much. They don't make money, in general. He was losing $100m a year at WaPo.
You buy a newspaper because you're rich and you want your opinions disseminated. Not because you think you'll make money. So the number of potential buyers is really small.
Their last peak of subscriptions was when Trump got elected in 2016. It was a good time for newspapers and TV. The NYT is having an even higher peak now[1]. Surely the Sulzbergers aren't the only family competent enough to run a newspaper. Lots of papers aren't owned by billionaires and manage to do ok. Wapo didn't have games in 2016 and people still subscribed. It just lost it's value to readers, so people unsubscribed. I certainly did.
Bezos is literally just showing his incompetence at this point in running a paper, and the NYT is probably loving it. Sure billionaires can buy social networks and papers, but people can also subscribe to and use things not owned by billionaires.
The NYT almost went out of business before they were rescued by billionaire Carlos Slim. The NYT is probably doing okay because the local papers everywhere else are a pale shadow of what they once were, so people sign up for NYT looking for what they used to have.
But they did switch to a pretty good online presence, the NYT did games, others could try to go after classifieds or other online pastimes without neutering the news room like Bezos has done. Sure it takes investment, Bezos seems to have had no problems doing that with Amazon.
He should've chosen to not make editorial decisions, and help with finding other revenue sources. Instead he lost revenue by making editorial decisions, and shows no signs of learning anything. He's lost more in market value at this point than yearly profit with his current strategy, which he can change anytime.
The big problem is that the greedy TechBros want to
influence legislation and politics. Right now there
is an orange TechBro in charge, so the oligarch
mafia will succeed (aside from their own intrinsic
stupidity) - but eventually voters in the USA need
to decide whether they really want the superrich
to pull all strings on the puppet.
Maybe the subscribers of the Post? They (reportedly) left in droves after Bezos interfered to stop the opinion board from endorsing a candidate and more recently fired nearly all international reporters. (including those in warzones)
He owns the paper and can do what he wants within the bounds of the law, but anyone is also free to criticize the decisions he makes, and subscribers are free to unsubscribe.
Criticism is about what someone ought to do, not what they can do. (these are very different)
Obviously his strategy with WA post seems to be working (for him and his ventures). He secured contracts both for AWS and Blue Origin from a seemingly hostile gov. Even if everyone unsubscribes and journalists leave, it was still a good investment.
So the shareholders of Amazon are happy. He did the right thing.
Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter. We opted to give him so much unchecked power.
> Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter.
Not sure where you have gotten this idea that morality or "doing the right thing" only applies to elected officials. The choices people make can be criticized even if those choices were legal or beneficial for their investors.
Destroying the credibility of a leading newspaper for some lucrative government contracts seems to be a net loss for society, but hey, at least Amazon's investors are happy and Bezos' tremendously unprofitable space company has some more cash.
There's some truth to this, but most of the news that gets disseminated on social media was originally gathered by a professional journalist somewhere.
