No Clue.

Illustration by Valerie Holt

Hi. Welcome to yet another emergency edition of …

You will notice the logo is smaller than usual today, because I don’t really know how pissed off I am entitled to be. It’s complicated. Awful, but complicated. Also, it’s got an elegant and vicious literary allusion, so we are both pretty much stuck with it.

When I was an adolescent, one of my favorite books was “Up the Down Staircase,” a novel by Bel Kaufman, who happens to have been the granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer who gave the world Tevye the Milkman. (This is inessential to the rest of today’s tale, but part of my sacred job is educating the masses.)

Anyway. Ms. Kaufman’s book was darkly funny and strangely poignant — loosely based on her years teaching in the New York City public schools.

At one point, an emotionally troubled 16-year-old student writes a love letter to her English teacher, a dreamy Robert Redford type whom the book’s teacher-narrator protagonist, Sylvia Barrett, is dating. The guy sends the note back to the student, intact, but copyedited to correct her grammar and syntax and word usage. When Sylvia tells her guy how shocked she is at his callousness, he says, “What was I supposed to do, encourage a neurotic teenager?” The girl attempts suicide. Sylvia breaks up with the cad.

Yesterday, in this space, we published a plaintive letter from the increasingly demoralized — and diminishing —staff at The Post, begging Jeffrey Bezos to at least come and talk to them, and tell them about his vision for the paper, so they can better understand the crisis-drenched maelstrom in which they find themselves, and find some reassurance that the ethics of the institution are not irretrievably compromised. They wanted to know that the paper will not be enslaved by cold business concerns and marketing strategies and will still be in the hands of caring journalists.

Today, they got their letter back, copyedited. Basically. It was contained in a New York Times story reporting that the paper’s new mission is to “Reach All of America.” It is not likely that The Post and/or Bezos intended this as their response to the staff, though that is how it played it out for everyone to see. And what they saw was impersonal and ugly — mostly jargon and empty sloganeering.

This is just me speaking. I have yet to detect similar disgust within the ranks; I’m doing it for them.

According to The Times, the mission statement was delivered this week to very top execs in a slide-deck presentation from Suzi Watford, who joined the paper just last May as the Post’s first Chief Strategy Officer. According to her job description, she is in charge of aligning the publication’s strategy “across all business functions and overseeing brand identity – including marketing and events efforts.” She is, evidently, a suit.

The new mission, she said, will include significantly increased use of Artificial Intelligence. The overarching goal is to make more money — this is explicitly stated — by reaching vastly more people in some unexplained and unexplored way.

To summarize: Yesterday, the staff sent an SOS, a plea for a life preserver. What they publicly received today was an anvil of yammering salesmanship.

“Storytelling,” the staff is being told, should “bring a relentless investigative spirit, backed by credible sources, to deliver impactful stories in formats the world wants.” What are those “formats”? Are they pandering to the basest public tastes? No clue. The goal, they say, is to rise from fewer than 3 million subscribers to 200 million paying users, a seemingly unreachable number. How will they do this? No clue.

Has the letter to Bezos even been read by Bezos?

No clue.

Hey, Wapo: Get a clue. The staircase is designed to go up.

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Important alert: “The Contrarian” debuted yesterday, along with a debut offering from humorist Andy Borowitz. This was it, in its entirety:

In an effort to broaden its appeal, the Washington Post has changed its slogan from “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” The following are six runner-up slogans that were in strong contention:

The Kid Rock of Newspapers

Every Subscription Comes With Free Trump Bible

All the News by Writers Who Haven’t Quit

News? Fuck Yeah!

Ten Millionth Subscriber Gets to Ride in Bezos’s Rocket

Release the Kraken.

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Frankly, it is not an auspicious debut, for Borowitz or The Contrarian, which apparently decided these were funny. Borowitz clearly dashed them off and phoned them in.

I am expecting better. I hope we’ll get it.

That’s it for today. Please send in your questions and observations here.

And please take this Gene Pool Gene Poll, which, we emphasize, is more about expectations versus reality than an empirical measure of reality.

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If you like this, perhaps you would consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” If you don’t like this, perhaps you would consider upgrading your subscription to “paid” on the theory that it might encourage me to get better. It’s only $4.15 a month. Some Substackers charge as much as $8 a month. In fact — this is true — some charge as much as $1,600 a month.

I might have to go there some day soon. Lock in to this low rate now, before it is too late.