Jaysos, Bezos ...

“The Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet, because that’s a measure of its relevance. If people won't pay for our product, it's not a good enough product. It would be, like, doing poetry without rhyming. It's too easy.”

— Jeffrey Bezos, explaining why he didn’t personally subsidize his newspaper to keep it strong.

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It turns out the world’s fourth richest man is a dope!

Also, a weasel, a tightwad and a buck-passer. Who knew?

Have you seen Jeff Bezos’s full interview this week with CNBC, conducted on two folding chairs in the vast Blue Origin rocket factory? I’ll summarize and annotate below, specifically the parts about The Post. We’ll start with the lowest hanging fruit: The poetry thing.

No, Jeff, good free-verse isn’t “too easy.” It is incredibly hard because it involves distilling a complex truth into its most elemental form, without the comforting scaffolding of rhyme and meter. It takes artistry. Dopes tend not to understand this. Here’s an actual rhyming poem about just that sort of dope:

To many people artists seem
undisciplined and lawless.
Such laziness, with such great gifts,
seems little short of crime.
One mystery is how they make
the things they make so flawless;
another, what they're doing with
their energy and time.

— Piet Hein

See, Jeff?

No, I didn’t think so. But let’s move on.

—

When you bought The Post in 2013, you famously told the newsroom staff that they were not the problem. The problem, you said, was on the business side. The writing and editing staff, you said, was doing brilliant work that didn’t need fixing.

That statement is apparently no longer operational. I say that because after a few healthy and productive years, you started to see some financial vulnerabilities, squishy spots in the business model. And so, despite your previous assurances to staff, you proceeded to seize the newsroom and fix it to death.

After months of misery and more threatened misery, last February you fired the coup de grace by firing more than a third of the staff, eliminating entire departments, including virtually all cultural coverage and sports coverage and visual arts, all of which were sweet spots for the paper’s engagement with readers.

Why did you do this? Your interview suggests a reason: Now, you’re blaming the staff. That’s what you meant by this, in the interview:

‘The Post is going to continue to be an important institution. And in fact, it’s going to be a more important institution because of this financial discipline. It needs to be relevant to readers. It needs to stand on its own two feet. I don’t want it to be a charity. It doesn’t need to be and it shouldn’t be.”

Let’s parse this, Jeff. Let’s try to prudently assess the real blame. Or in your words, apply some financial metrics. You are big on metrics, letting machines decide your trajectories. Let’s see where that leaves us, trajectory-wise, okay?

When you charted a new course for the paper, you reacted not like a man who had been given a sacred public trust — you didn’t have, and still do not have, any idea what journalism is about— but like a bean counter, you approached it as though it were Five Guys, or Jiffy Lube.

So what went wrong?

“What went wrong,” you told CNN, “is that we did not adapt.” You were talking about writing. You were passing the buck, scapegoating. Because as you now know, the problem was you. The problem was business foresight, and you didn’t have it.

It turns out you were right the first time. The Post’s written word (you and your minions soullessly call it “content”) was not broken. What was broken was, indeed, the business plan, because the incompetent management you hired totally failed to understand the dynamics in its industry. The New York Times figured it out, and has been wolfing your lunch ever since, stealing your staff, winning over your disappointed subscribers in gargantuan numbers.

The Times invested heavily in things their metrics told them — only they found the right metrics, and your managers did not. The Times, not The Post, diversified intelligently while preserving the core newsroom.

The Times realized that people need newspapers to help them be more informed citizens. They love newspapers because it feels good and smart to read them. But they buy newspapers for happy things they can use. So The Times spent $30 million on Wirecutter, which reviews retail products. They bought Wordle for about $2 million. They didn’t fire their sports staff, they beefed it up, purchasing The Athletic — the huge, vibrant sports operation — for just over $500 million.

You also spent just over $500 million for something, Jeff. A yacht and its suckerfish escort ship to house the support staff of 50.

Under you, The Post invested its money phenomenally unwisely, the most outrageous expenditure of all being your hiring of Will Lewis. Lewis was the ethically compromised and catastrophically ineffective guy you anointed publisher at a $3 million salary, and later fired overnight because he physically hid from his staff rather than personally tell more than a third of them that were out of a job. (And then attended a big, fancy Super Bowl party to hobnob with celebs.)

You said that firing hundreds of people was necessary to make the product leaner, tougher — producing more with vastly fewer resources. You know, working harder. In the end, you ran the paper like you run Amazon. Basically, you expected your employees to pee in bottles. You expected your employees to keep on working when their colleagues died.

Leaner and tougher. Your cluelessness about this is mind-boggling.

You say, in the interview, that you want to keep emphasizing and supporting investigative journalism. Do you really? This is from a recent story in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Newsroom leaders have sought to reverse a trend that came into practice in the days of Martin Baron, the former executive editor: allowing reporters to chase multiple angles on the big stories of the day. This let-chaos-reign approach led to high output, albeit at the expense of editorial focus. Now the Post will look to more tightly control coverage plans for marquee stories, disincentivizing reporters from running down threads deemed less essential.”

Good God.

“Running down threads” is the essence of investigative journalism.

What exactly do you think the Post’s expose of Watergate was? It was two schmoes from the metro desk spending oodles of time chasing down ghosts, running down loose ends, doing seemingly unproductive weeks of work and eventually helping topple a corrupt presidency. You probably don’t know anything about this, so watch this short clip.

Your arrogance has been breathtaking. You created disaster with your edict that the newspaper’s Opinions section be limited to your icy libertarian opinions alone. You achieved that, and the results have been repugnant to a core readership that had been accustomed to far more versatility of thought.

Anyway, Jeff, I want to end with a free-verse poem, one of my favorites. It was written by Ezra Pound, a great poet who happened also to be a Nazi propagandist. He was complicated, okay? So were his unrhymed poems. Try this one:

In A Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

—

That’s it, Jeff. The whole poem.

Do you know what it means? Didn’t think so. I will explain it — at least, what it means to me.

The poet is in a metro station. It is raining. A train has just unloaded. Faces stream past him — only instantly visible and then departing — people, beset by modernity, hurrying to wherever they are going. It is a sea of transience, of dehumanizing anonymity.

But the poet realizes something heartening; in of the darkness of that station, emptying out of the bowels of the earth, are individuals, all with their own personalities, their own stories. He sees a loneliness but also a loveliness in this, and finds an elegant comparison. Perhaps he notices a tree in the rain, or perhaps that image is all in his mind, but in that moment it’s just as real to him: Fresh, glistening pastel petals on a wet, cold black branch.

What he’s treasuring is both the beauty of life, and its fragility.

Do you feel it now, Jeff?

I didn’t think so.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

In the past, I have questioned whether unrhymed poetry can actually be considered poetry, as opposed to just evocative prose. Also, that the danger in unrhymed poetry is that unless it is very, very good, it is pretentious and threatens to become the provenance of bad would-be poets.

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That’s it for today, except for my plea. The Gene Pool survives due to your generosity. I am grateful for your help.