The Grahams Have Sold The Washington Post; Good Riddance To The Family That's Almost Killed It
By
Joe Rothstein
—
August 12, 2013
Editor, EINnews.com
If you happen to live in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and subscribe to the Washington Post you’ve been subjected to a relentless barrage of articles lately about the sale of the newspaper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The story du jour in yesterday’s Sunday Post, top of the front page no less, is an extensive profile of Bezos, aggregated from the reporting of six Post reporters---a tome that expended considerable reportorial and editing time and resources.
What we learn from this mega-effort of enterprise reporting is that Jeff Bezos has left in his wake some unhappy competitors and some disgruntled former employees. This "news" is hardly surprising, given his total disruption of the retail sales, book selling and book publishing industries. You don’t build a $60 billion business in 15 years out of thin air, as Bezos has, without stepping on some others’ turf.
Skepticism of Jeff Bezos and his motives in buying the Post is a recurring story line in much of the Post’s coverage of its own in-house business story.
The other story line has been adulation for publisher Donald Graham and the family that has owned and published the Post for 80 years. Today’s contribution to that eulogy is a soppy “Farewell Don” piece by a former editor who never forgot that when he was a cub reporter Graham actually read one of his stories and spoke to him.
All of the self-congratulatory praise of Graham's Post and latent fear of Bezos' hardly stands up under independent scrutiny and impresses me as over-the-top journalism reflecting the Post's insular view of its own achievements and exaggerated self-importance.
Any fair assessment of the Post’s performance under Graham’s leadership would have to begin with the fact that today’s Washington Post is a shell of the Post of the Watergate era. The Post has been rightly recognized far and wide for its role in bringing down the Nixon White House when no other media organization was willing to risk its future digging deeply into that story.
But Watergate was 40 years ago. Since then the Post has shuttered its foreign and domestic bureaus and slashed its editorial staff. The Sunday opinion section, once a provocative forum for ideas, now shares space with book reviews. The book review section itself is long gone along with much of the experienced editorial staff that once made the Post a very rich read. A Post subscriber these days can skim through its pages pretty quickly.
By any common measurement today’s Washington Post is a business failure. Even with all of its Watergate-era fame and its virtual monopoly in the Washington, D.C. market, the Post’s management has botched transition into the digital era. I was once told by someone who should know that the Post was offered a substantial ownership in Google when Google was valued at only $100 million and turned it down. The years since have seen many attempts to crank the Post’s digital engines, none of them particularly successful.
The newspaper is enduring its seventh straight year of financial losses, about $50 million in 2012, double those of the year before. The latest circulation numbers show the Washington Post with an average circulation of 474,767, down 40% from its peak years even while serving a dynamic and growing metropolitan area.
More disastrous than its newspaper performance has been the Graham family’s management of its Kaplan higher education division, whose revenues plummeted from $406 million three years ago to $27 million in 2012.
Why the huge drop? Because the Obama administration cracked down on Kaplan and other for-profit private schools that were aggressively recruiting students and plying them with student loans. Reports documented vast abuses in the industry and found Kaplan to be one of the worst offenders. Of 30 schools examined, Kaplan had the third highest default rate, 25% higher than rates across the entire for-profit college sector.
Donald Graham personally lobbied hard to head off for-profit college reforms, even hiring former White House communications director Anita Dunn to help. You can’t blame a CEO for trying to save his company. But neither do you build a shrine to him for working overtime to maintain a system of predatory recruitment that cost taxpayers unnecessary billions and sent students into almost certain loan defaults.
Needless to say, one of the reasons the Grahams have been forced to sell the Post has been their disastrous investment in the shady world of for-profit higher education.
As the right-wing radical fringe gained strength, the Post could have played a key role in keeping a measure of political stability in Washington. Thousands of other media outlets with bureaus located here read the Post each day and are influenced by that papaer's editorial judgments. But all too often the Post has been editorially wishy-washy and all to engaged in he-said, she-said reporting when facts and common sense cried out for fearless reporting and editorial leadership.
What’s reflected in the Post’s coverage of its own sale is an outsize view of its own self-importance and a conceit about its editorial judgment. It’s a failing that’s endemic to much of the Washington, D.C. media industry.
To write for the Post allows reporters to rub elbows with the rich and famous---parties, private dinners and other occasions where reporters often see themselves as insiders in a self-protective circle. This is heady stuff, with the promise of page one by-line stories, which could lead to a live interview on the PBS NewsHour, and then maybe a place on a talking head TV show, followed by a call from an agent offering five figure speaking gigs.
The A-list social world of the Grahams and much of the Washington media community is not the world of everyone else, yet that’s what so often gets reflected in the stories that get assigned, their placement on prominent newspaper pages, and distributed worldwide on newswires.
When a newspaper loses half its readership it’s a big clue that management should question the relevance of old news judgment models. And that’s not just the Post’s problem. Pew Research tells us that interest in news among all age groups is growing even as newspaper pages and staffs are shrinking. For those who understand this dynamic there’s great opportunity.
That’s what makes Jeff Bezos’ decision to buy the Washington Post so interesting. Bezos understood early that there was a greater demand for books than the closed club of book publishers recognized or cared to serve. He saw the value of meticulous user-friendly retail sales when much of that industry was comfortably indifferent.
Now Bezos sees a newspaper publishing industry still top heavy with old-style dinosaurs, cannibalizing their own products and hoping that the public will be dumb enough to pay more or less. He sees a TV news landscape that’s largely morphed into car crashes and weather at the local level and strained attempts to compete as entertainment or political soap boxes on the networks. A TV industry digging in in its heels against digital conversion.
What can Jeff Bezos do with all this from a Washington Post mothership?
Amazon is the nation’s best retail distribution. The newspaper is a retail product. As for content, Bezos has always demanded quality performance and odds are very good he will demand that from the Post staff, with little patience for burnishing memories of glory years nearly a half century ago.
Beyond print, Amazon is a growing TV presence, offering tens of thousands of programs, producing new ones and reportedly building its own home consoles. If history is a guide, Bezos will enhance the Washington Post’s content and make it more available in more formats and platforms to more users.
Even in its diminished state I look forward to the copy of the Washington Post that shows up at my front door each day. I fully expect to be vastly more satisfied tomorrow with Bezos running the show, even if his staff isn’t sending him love letters.
(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)
If you happen to live in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and subscribe to the Washington Post you’ve been subjected to a relentless barrage of articles lately about the sale of the newspaper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The story du jour in yesterday’s Sunday Post, top of the front page no less, is an extensive profile of Bezos, aggregated from the reporting of six Post reporters---a tome that expended considerable reportorial and editing time and resources.
What we learn from this mega-effort of enterprise reporting is that Jeff Bezos has left in his wake some unhappy competitors and some disgruntled former employees. This "news" is hardly surprising, given his total disruption of the retail sales, book selling and book publishing industries. You don’t build a $60 billion business in 15 years out of thin air, as Bezos has, without stepping on some others’ turf.
Skepticism of Jeff Bezos and his motives in buying the Post is a recurring story line in much of the Post’s coverage of its own in-house business story.
The other story line has been adulation for publisher Donald Graham and the family that has owned and published the Post for 80 years. Today’s contribution to that eulogy is a soppy “Farewell Don” piece by a former editor who never forgot that when he was a cub reporter Graham actually read one of his stories and spoke to him.
All of the self-congratulatory praise of Graham's Post and latent fear of Bezos' hardly stands up under independent scrutiny and impresses me as over-the-top journalism reflecting the Post's insular view of its own achievements and exaggerated self-importance.
Any fair assessment of the Post’s performance under Graham’s leadership would have to begin with the fact that today’s Washington Post is a shell of the Post of the Watergate era. The Post has been rightly recognized far and wide for its role in bringing down the Nixon White House when no other media organization was willing to risk its future digging deeply into that story.
But Watergate was 40 years ago. Since then the Post has shuttered its foreign and domestic bureaus and slashed its editorial staff. The Sunday opinion section, once a provocative forum for ideas, now shares space with book reviews. The book review section itself is long gone along with much of the experienced editorial staff that once made the Post a very rich read. A Post subscriber these days can skim through its pages pretty quickly.
By any common measurement today’s Washington Post is a business failure. Even with all of its Watergate-era fame and its virtual monopoly in the Washington, D.C. market, the Post’s management has botched transition into the digital era. I was once told by someone who should know that the Post was offered a substantial ownership in Google when Google was valued at only $100 million and turned it down. The years since have seen many attempts to crank the Post’s digital engines, none of them particularly successful.
The newspaper is enduring its seventh straight year of financial losses, about $50 million in 2012, double those of the year before. The latest circulation numbers show the Washington Post with an average circulation of 474,767, down 40% from its peak years even while serving a dynamic and growing metropolitan area.
More disastrous than its newspaper performance has been the Graham family’s management of its Kaplan higher education division, whose revenues plummeted from $406 million three years ago to $27 million in 2012.
Why the huge drop? Because the Obama administration cracked down on Kaplan and other for-profit private schools that were aggressively recruiting students and plying them with student loans. Reports documented vast abuses in the industry and found Kaplan to be one of the worst offenders. Of 30 schools examined, Kaplan had the third highest default rate, 25% higher than rates across the entire for-profit college sector.
Donald Graham personally lobbied hard to head off for-profit college reforms, even hiring former White House communications director Anita Dunn to help. You can’t blame a CEO for trying to save his company. But neither do you build a shrine to him for working overtime to maintain a system of predatory recruitment that cost taxpayers unnecessary billions and sent students into almost certain loan defaults.
Needless to say, one of the reasons the Grahams have been forced to sell the Post has been their disastrous investment in the shady world of for-profit higher education.
As the right-wing radical fringe gained strength, the Post could have played a key role in keeping a measure of political stability in Washington. Thousands of other media outlets with bureaus located here read the Post each day and are influenced by that papaer's editorial judgments. But all too often the Post has been editorially wishy-washy and all to engaged in he-said, she-said reporting when facts and common sense cried out for fearless reporting and editorial leadership.
What’s reflected in the Post’s coverage of its own sale is an outsize view of its own self-importance and a conceit about its editorial judgment. It’s a failing that’s endemic to much of the Washington, D.C. media industry.
To write for the Post allows reporters to rub elbows with the rich and famous---parties, private dinners and other occasions where reporters often see themselves as insiders in a self-protective circle. This is heady stuff, with the promise of page one by-line stories, which could lead to a live interview on the PBS NewsHour, and then maybe a place on a talking head TV show, followed by a call from an agent offering five figure speaking gigs.
The A-list social world of the Grahams and much of the Washington media community is not the world of everyone else, yet that’s what so often gets reflected in the stories that get assigned, their placement on prominent newspaper pages, and distributed worldwide on newswires.
When a newspaper loses half its readership it’s a big clue that management should question the relevance of old news judgment models. And that’s not just the Post’s problem. Pew Research tells us that interest in news among all age groups is growing even as newspaper pages and staffs are shrinking. For those who understand this dynamic there’s great opportunity.
That’s what makes Jeff Bezos’ decision to buy the Washington Post so interesting. Bezos understood early that there was a greater demand for books than the closed club of book publishers recognized or cared to serve. He saw the value of meticulous user-friendly retail sales when much of that industry was comfortably indifferent.
Now Bezos sees a newspaper publishing industry still top heavy with old-style dinosaurs, cannibalizing their own products and hoping that the public will be dumb enough to pay more or less. He sees a TV news landscape that’s largely morphed into car crashes and weather at the local level and strained attempts to compete as entertainment or political soap boxes on the networks. A TV industry digging in in its heels against digital conversion.
What can Jeff Bezos do with all this from a Washington Post mothership?
Amazon is the nation’s best retail distribution. The newspaper is a retail product. As for content, Bezos has always demanded quality performance and odds are very good he will demand that from the Post staff, with little patience for burnishing memories of glory years nearly a half century ago.
Beyond print, Amazon is a growing TV presence, offering tens of thousands of programs, producing new ones and reportedly building its own home consoles. If history is a guide, Bezos will enhance the Washington Post’s content and make it more available in more formats and platforms to more users.
Even in its diminished state I look forward to the copy of the Washington Post that shows up at my front door each day. I fully expect to be vastly more satisfied tomorrow with Bezos running the show, even if his staff isn’t sending him love letters.
(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)
Joe Rothstein is a political strategist and media producer who worked in more than 200 campaigns for political office and political causes. He also has served as editor of the Anchorage Daily News and as an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. He has a master's degree in journalism from UCLA. Mr. Rothstein is the author of award-winning political thrillers, The Latina President and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her, The Salvation Project, and The Moment of Menace. For more information, please visit his website at https://www.joerothstein.net/.
