If today’s largest traditional media companies produce quality work, then why are they facing record low public trust and financial losses? Many MSM "journalists" will come to Substack after they get fired or quit and cry for censorship. I hope Substack preserves free speech for everyone and elevates true independent voices, whose work quality is much higher than those who are regurgitating the same copy-pasta word salad propaganda that they would be spewing for their former employers.
I don't think people who take this position with traditional media do their own position much of a service. It is definitely true that platforms like Substack have led to a flourishing of outstanding writing and media. And it's definitely true that traditional media has more than its fair share of whiffs, and some aspects of its coverage are significantly worse than the work produced by independents. And traditional media in recent years does not have a proud record when it comes to supporting and upholding free speech. But it's also true that on many subjects, in many areas, the reporters and editors who work in traditional media produce some of the best and most important coverage in existence—and that includes everything from deeply reported magazine features, conflict reporting from danger zones in far-flung fields, investigations into hostile regimes, brass tacks reporting on corruption in political and corporate bodies from small towns to large cities, deep dives into what's going on with municipal transit lines, and so on, many of which stories will never find their way to the Op-Ed pages or the shooting galleries of X.
When critics of traditional media overstep and say "All traditional media is bad, actually," they're making the same mistake that critics of Elon Musk make when they say, "Elon is an idiot who just got lucky." No. Effective critiques must acknowledge their subject's achievements and point the crosshairs at the right places. Otherwise it's hard to take them seriously.
Very true. Some really important stories have been covered by the MSM. Top quality reporting. The very best. The Las Vegas shootings for example. Or FEMA dropping the ball in North Carolina. The Lahaina stories showing people were trapped by local LEOs and died as a result. A big one! We are being chemically sprayed day after day. By what, we don’t know. By whom, we don’t know. How the latest would be assassin travels around the world freely on no money, coming and going to Ukraine. And why the FBI allowed Crooks to get 8 shots off. Then when given the order the counter sniper didn’t move his rifle an inch, that is he had him lined up already, and took him out. Incredible in depth reporting by the MSM. Like dogs with a bone they were. Not to mention amazing work they did on the COVID response fiasco and the even greater COVID vax genocide. Yes. The MSM does stellar work so often. That’s why we all support it as we do. (IE. We ignore it.)
A completely unserious response, especially having the gall to use the word genocide (with no proof) regarding a successful vaccination program, when an actual genocide is happening. I think your comment and attention should be directed to the platform that begins with a Q.
The Covid Vax is the worst medical disaster in human history. Likely 20M dead already with 100M-200M seriously injured. So bad and yet it continues. The Medical Industrial Complex continues to push it. They are now intentionally killing people. Well, they were all along. But some naive trusting people probably believed it. No one with a functioning brain can still believe it.
There are mountains of proof. MSM calls it misinformation so that their viewership/readership can arrogantly sniff at it as being "conspiracy theories." One day it shall be uncovered for what it was.
sure media like that is important but the way it is used or not used is not honorable.
2 sundays ago i watched meet the press which purports to report the important things that week. I expected to see some mention of the Iranian missiles raining down because this attack was days earlier, remember the image? Not important enough, but whatever Trump did or said deserved 2/3 of their program bashing.
BoBo, I am with you on this one. Tired of hearing Trump stuff 24/7 (because not a fan, and.just.tired.). On the practical side, a) Trump stuff gets attention which helps spin ad dollars and b) there is only so much time in a TV news or discussion segment - they cannot cover every major happening as it happens. Editorial decisions.
Do you really believe there's investigative media in MSM? That's super laughable!! A few Substack journalists do more work and value added publication than all the legacy parrots. Parrots for the DNC.
Traditional media and has covered up and ignored major stories on everything from Hunter Biden's laptop to Covid. They've also lied about Russiagate and the Ukraine.
I would hardly call those "whiffs", those are harmful to our society and democracy.
Musk hasn't been lucky, he's been govt funded. As was Bezos. Again you won't find stories in this in traditional media, but a bit of digging means even the average Joe can find the facts out. So why can't "traditional media".
The fact is the public are onto the way traditional media works to manipulate them and they aren't having it, and that's why it will die.
Amen my Russian broski 🙏 im,a Ukrainian immigrant to America by the way!!! Hate this globalist created war in Ukraine against two brother countries. We need to annihilate all globalists.
Absolutely. And the use of algorithms needs to remain limited as well. Let a true network of people who connect and communicate pass on good discoveries or poor quality writers to avoid. I find more thinkers from reading the comments of those who I follow already but in some cases those new discoveries are out of left field. Algorithms trying to guess what I want is a Twitter thing. We don’t want that.
Nah. When all the Dailies shut down or get bought by private equity firms they will just run AI-generated pablum that informs but keeps the IQ needed down to maybe an average 6th grader's comprehension level.
It looks like quite basic supply and demand, to me. There's a higher supply than ever of journalism (the vast majority of which can be accessed for free), meaning that organisations like WaPo can only extract money from the demand for high-quality journalism specifically, which is low-ish.
Just because there's not a market for something that makes it financially viable to provide a quality product doesn't mean the product wasn't of good quality. (I very much doubt the best painted portrait of me in the world would command a sufficiently high price to pay the artist above minimum wage, either, even if the artist was excellent.)
One of the harsh realities of the world is that it's not enough for something you offer to be *good* for it to work as a product. The entire business model has to be viable, not just the quality of the offering.
These papers started bleeding money when they decided to vilify half of their readership. Those readers did the only rational thing they could, they took their dollars and left. When your the umpire, you don’t wear the uniform of one of the teams, you call balls and strikes. That’s the real underlying issue here. The rest is just a channel issue on how to deliver your product. If your product is crap, no channel or group of channels will save you.
Finally, somebody who understands what happened in J-world. WaPo, NYT, etc., damaged mid- and small town newspapers by telling the world “a free press means our product is free.” Thus, for years it prevented all other papers (except the Wall Street Journal) from being able to justify charging for an online subscription. The economic concept “Free is not a business model” was beyond their concept-processing ability.
You need to read up on the concept of materiality. Just because something happens, doesn’t make it the driving force behind a trend. Among other things I’m a Chartered Financial Analyst and the main driver on losing readers across all channels, and hence money, is the vilification of half of your readership. Classified ad revenue is easily replaced with online advertising and the subscription model is still the driving force with these publications. Their revenue is decreasing because subscriptions are decreasing. I actually pay for more content now than I did before the digitalization of these media. You’re talking a false narrative at face value.
Subscription revenue was always the smallest piece of the revenue pie. Classifieds were top, then ads, then subs. And online ads cost a lot less than print ads. Throw in the aforementioned giving away of content for free and the whole industry model imploded 25 years ago. You can argue, if you want, that subscriptions could be higher (although I attest not high enough to break even for most publications of this size). But the industry cratered long before we got to our current ideological divide.
How hard is it for you to understand this? Conservatives and libertarians are being vilified by these publications and have voted with their dollars. WaPo brought in an Englishman who point blank told these leftist retards that nobody is trading their garbage. You can’t attack 50%+ of your customer base and not expect to take a massive hit. They are bleeding out money over the last 10 years or so because they decided to insult and vilify their customers.
My issue as a reader, rather than consumer of screaming podcasts, was that for decades I asked my far right friends for ANY written source of news. There were none worth reading. While I quite agree that most written news is very left slanted, there seems to be NO true right or balanced mid sources of written content in paper form. Why? If folks are voting their pocketbook at least a few living dinosaurs red papers should exist?
Bezos's op-ed correctly identified that many Americans perceive the WaPo to be biased. It left unspoken the fact that many Americans feel this way because the WaPo is, in fact, biased. It's hard to identify a business model that would work when there is a significant disconnect between the product as promised and the product as delivered.
I call bullshit newspapers, have declared endorsements for president for decades. It’s handled by a department completely separate from the journalists that’s how it’s always been handled. He did this because he’s a coward — because if Trump manages to weasel his criminal ass back into the White House, he thinks it will spare him and the Washington Post — That’s where he’s wrong. He also doesn’t want his space company to be left out of government contracts. Another billionaire Asshole.
Can an organization that's 95% composed of Harris voters and 90% registered Democratic subscribers avoid bias though? It's rather different than individual efforts toward intellectual honesty. A better question: would such an organization ever WANT to avoid bias? Or would it just want to hide it?
James - I see your comment replying to me (thank you) and link to your substack which I hope to have time to read at some point ( right now ain’t a good time). I must say that I am not a journalist so my views are those of an outsider.
It’s hard not to see the decision not to endorse Harris as anything but one of self-interest — Bezos’s own considerable other business interests aside, the only viable business model the Post has found in the past decade has been covering Trump.
The bias is evident to everyone. Why would anyone (except for the true believers), subscribe to something when the take is ideologically driven. There is not anything interesting when you know the content before you read it.
Ask those tuning into Fix News every evening. They settled out of court for close to $1B in the recent past over lies and conspiring emails to prove it. I didn’t hear a peep from the right over that.
Let's face it, news consumers prefer validation over facts. Critical thought is on life support.
This has nothing to do with my statement. Did I hit too close to home? Voting in the United States is stable. Sixty of the sixty-one court cases in ‘20-’21 proved that outright. Are you still watching Fox News?
Nearly all the cases were dropped and never had a chance to have evidence presented. If anyone thinks this nation would ever admit to election fraud be it red or blue team does not understand how politics and control over the people works. Think the government has ever investigated itself and found itself guilty? Think they would just say oh well we cheated now here is your new president regardless of whether red or blue was in office? That would prove we live in a banana republic and would risk a revolution. They will double and triple down regardless of what evidence is out there. Paper ballots and ID is definitely the way to go with both red and blue counting them together. An internet connected voting machine with software that has never been allowed to have the code audited does not pass the smell test. But I digress voting does not matter as we always select a zionist first America last traitor shill who advances the NWO agenda.
Baaahhhhh some more for us ok? Select your demociding sheep herder tax slave master and see how it works out for you. Both red and blue zionist sheep herders leads to the same slaughter house.
I have a problem with the corporate ownership of the news media. The change in rules during GW Bush’s term by Powell is what messed it all up. Restore the media ownership regulations and the integrity of the news media will be restored.
This is a cute rebellious rhetoric, however, unless you are willing to live like a Tibetan monk, you'll need to find viable alternatives for the products and services these companies offer. Unfortunately, more often than not there aren't many.
There is a universal boycott to Amazon stArting Nov 5 and going to Dec 5th , many say their boycotting until Jan 6 after holidays. . Get em where it hurts
I don't need to know you. I'm just replying to your statement which doesn't reflect the realty of the majority. Kudos to you for the lifestyle you chose and are able to maintain and enjoy it. It's not for everyone. There are too many people who are not in a position to take that path, whether due to their jobs, family or other personal or practical reasons. For many of them the boycotts you're calling for are simply not their reality.
Respectfully, when people say "boycott amazon", "boycott mcdonalds", "boycott cocoa cola" we are directing these calls of action to the middle class, ESPECIALLY upper middle class who LITERALLY have the time & money & ability to avoid these businesses and spend their money more local and more responsibly. No one in their right mind would yell at people living in poverty "hey stop buying crap from walmart and mcdonalds".
Its actually easy to make better decisions that help, and every little action helps, however insignificant or naive you may think it is.
You just have to decide to be a better person 🤷🏻♀️
Effective boycotts are not simply stopping buying stuff, they must have a stated purpose in mind: "Save the Hedgehogs or we will boycott your french fries" (feel free to substitute your own special interest causes). Boycotting the WaPo might be in protest of their non-endoresemnt policy, but it could be self-defeating if you rely in them for news. You probably know who you should vote for anyway, so what's the prob? Just saying.
Yeah dude the purpose is 86ing the concept of trillionaires or multi-billionaires; another concept- "boycott amazon to save _____ (insert a dozen different things- local book stores, your community. the literal Amazon rainforest, the USPS, etc)"; no one in the entire world ONLY has access to the washington post, thats absurd. If someone is priveleged enough to receive western media they likely have daily free or very affordable access to a handful of publications. Honestly your entire comment is so.....ick. But take care ✌️🫶🏼
Gigi - "We cannot keep lining billionaires pockets" is a nice thought, but changing our tax system to be more progressive -- with more tax brackets designed for those with household incomes over say 1 million a year -- would put more dollars into the Treasury (and help pay down debt) while achieving the socially useful goal of not enriching the already obscenely rich.
Currently, the top tax bracket is 37% on earned income on households making $731k/yr. That is pretty cushy but not billionaire-class money. To take an extreme example, Elon Musk's wealth grows by over $14 BILLION a year (not all is taxable as income, though). Jeff Bezos' wealth grows by a :measly" 9.6 BILLION a year. Boycotts might hurt these guys' feelings, but their bank accounts? Not so much.
I do agree that e-tailing has hurt small retailers -- and big ones, too (think Barnes & Noble) -- but rather than mobilizing for a boycott, just encourage consumers to buy locally or use their favorite store's online sales. (Yeah, I am well aware that many small shops market their goods through Amazon).
Disagree on "cannot keep lining billionaires' pockets" by means of boycotts. A fairer tax system would help - not that billionaires should be taxed out of existence -- without them (actually without Elon and Jeff we wouldn't have much of a space program.
Also fck anyone who wears a "colonize Mars" tshirt, they can catch these hands. I dont want or need space programs. Especially if their existence is contingent on exploitation.
Absolute nonsense. The Post continues to endorse down-ballot candidates so the whole self-serving twaddle about “bias” rings hollow. This was nothing more than Bezos acting in his own self interest and trying to split the baby.
Can't like this enough. This post by Mackenzie is exactly wrong pretty much every point. As those unemployed hack "journalists" migrate to Substack, which is just another subscription platform for writers (yknow, like a newspaper... but electronic), they'll just keep making...and pumping out their bilge as it too begins to sag below the waterline. It's the same thing as when California residents flee their increasingly unaffordable and dystopian cities and just continue to support the same policies that drove them to leave in all their new digs. Eventually, you're going to run out of places to flee. And the funds will dry up. And, unfortunately for the country, patience also eventually will run out, too. Americans have forgotten, because it's been 140 years or so, and our education system is infected by the same mendacity as journalism, that even politics are limited. But history itself is a teacher. And the lessons will be hard ones.
You totally missed addressing the problem. You could’ve kept that whole piece very short all you needed to say was that the timing was terrible. If he had done this a year ago, it would’ve been fine if he did it a week after the election that would’ve been fine.
The Opinion Editor and the Editorial Board did the work they were asked to do and then the owner interfered in their work. If you want to rethink the existence of the Opinion pages, I'd be all for it, honestly. I hate opinion writing. And I hate endorsements. But I hate owner interference in content even more. Post-election is a traditional time for beat reassignments and other coverage change decisions. It would have been great to sit down with the Opinion staff and Editorial Board and say, "let's rethink how we're doing this." I'd honestly have been so happy with that outcome.
Unfortunately for the owner they eat the costs and if a paper isn't selling because their staff are ideological dickheads instead of objective observers then said owner is personally obligated to act. Otherwise, the staff can pony up the $250M to buy the owner out of they feel their model reflects a winning strategy.
The owner of a paper is almost always going to eat the costs. The revenue stream dried up with the loss of classifieds and the lower cost of online ads.
Also, I'm not sure how your comment is at all responding to anything I said. Like I keep reading it and I think maybe you're responding to someone else? It's not germane.
Whoawhoawhoa, Elizabethetc -- I LOVE reading opinions and Op-Eds. Them (especially good editorial cartoons), crosswords and the Comix page make the oar worthwhile for me. Pleas don't pu his the suggestion box.
it would accomplish the long-term goal of getting the newspaper out of the endorsing business without having almost as much affect by not endorsing at this late stage. this non-endorsement at this late stage when it was very well expected that they would be endorsing. Harris is in fact a fainthearted endorsement of Trump to many people.
I don’t like the decision, don’t believe Bezos’ explanation. But, 1) the loss of 200,000 subs will hurt the post and reporters, won’t hurt Bezos. 2) What might get Bezos’ attention: the loss of 200,000 Amazon buyers. But everyone knows we can give up our news, can’t give up our stuff. So no talk of Amazon boycott.
Perhaps this is similar to when Netflix announced they were no longer mailing DVDs. People freaked out and customers bailed. Years later, they were the leaders in streaming content. I don’t read the WP and likely never will. That said, I can see the need to legacy media to make changes if there is any hope for a future. The other option is to continue to cater to a shrinking number of customers while losing out to new journalism, aka Substack and podcasts.
The problem is it appears more and more people want actual journalism instead of party line propaganda. It’s going to be difficult to change the mindset of an organization back to performing actual journalism.
I think the opposite is true. More and more people just want to read opinion pieces that support their existing worldview and nobody wants to read straight news anymore unless it's some kind of grisly crime story or a celebrity died.
Well, actually— many of us are also ditching Amazon Prime, and boycotting Whole Foods. And 200k cancelled subscriptions is not chump change, nor is it likely the end of subscribers abandoning ship.
lol...how many is "many of us." Is it like most of us, a lot of us, scores of us, plenty of us, my whole family and then some?
Well, actually -75% of US shoppers have a Prime membership. Well actually, Amazon has 200 million members. I wonder what the number was before "many" ditched Prime.
Amazon has 180 million Prime subscribers plus all the people who buy from them without a subscription. Good luck getting their attention. And Bezos only owns 9% of them so he really, really doesn't care. And 200k WaPo subscribers is less than 10%, and it's already bleeding money, so you're all just increasing his tax write off or getting more people laid off. So quit, but don't think anyone cares but you.
Our newsroom stopped endorsements a decade ago when we found it didn't inform readers; it only divided them and led to spiteful comments and voting. Instead, we used the editorial page to lay out major policies of each platform. That's the purpose of journalism: to inform.
In any event, I doubt that anyone (OK, maybe there are a few clueless saps) votes based on who a newspaper endorses. Which will always be the Democrat. Always. So, what's the point?
I for one am not comfortable with the idea that we should depend on the whims of billionaires to maintain vital institutions and determine the public good. Good for whom?
Someone needs to explain to Jeff Bezos why a newspaper has an Opinion section… or perhaps he’s knows that, and his refusal to allow his paper’s endorsement of VP Harris is all about staying on Trump’s good side to receive critical government contracts for his fledgling space toy.
His claim that distrust of the media is caused by newspapers endorsing one candidate over the other is nonsense. Newspapers have written editorials - a short essay or column that delivers each newspaper’s institutional statement of opinion - since Horace Greeley founded the New York Tribune in 1841. Candidate endorsement began in 1860, when the New York Times endorsed Lincoln. All of a sudden, after over 15O years, voters distrust institutional statements of opinion? Hogwash.
If today’s largest traditional media companies produce quality work, then why are they facing record low public trust and financial losses? Many MSM "journalists" will come to Substack after they get fired or quit and cry for censorship. I hope Substack preserves free speech for everyone and elevates true independent voices, whose work quality is much higher than those who are regurgitating the same copy-pasta word salad propaganda that they would be spewing for their former employers.
I don't think people who take this position with traditional media do their own position much of a service. It is definitely true that platforms like Substack have led to a flourishing of outstanding writing and media. And it's definitely true that traditional media has more than its fair share of whiffs, and some aspects of its coverage are significantly worse than the work produced by independents. And traditional media in recent years does not have a proud record when it comes to supporting and upholding free speech. But it's also true that on many subjects, in many areas, the reporters and editors who work in traditional media produce some of the best and most important coverage in existence—and that includes everything from deeply reported magazine features, conflict reporting from danger zones in far-flung fields, investigations into hostile regimes, brass tacks reporting on corruption in political and corporate bodies from small towns to large cities, deep dives into what's going on with municipal transit lines, and so on, many of which stories will never find their way to the Op-Ed pages or the shooting galleries of X.
When critics of traditional media overstep and say "All traditional media is bad, actually," they're making the same mistake that critics of Elon Musk make when they say, "Elon is an idiot who just got lucky." No. Effective critiques must acknowledge their subject's achievements and point the crosshairs at the right places. Otherwise it's hard to take them seriously.
Very true. Some really important stories have been covered by the MSM. Top quality reporting. The very best. The Las Vegas shootings for example. Or FEMA dropping the ball in North Carolina. The Lahaina stories showing people were trapped by local LEOs and died as a result. A big one! We are being chemically sprayed day after day. By what, we don’t know. By whom, we don’t know. How the latest would be assassin travels around the world freely on no money, coming and going to Ukraine. And why the FBI allowed Crooks to get 8 shots off. Then when given the order the counter sniper didn’t move his rifle an inch, that is he had him lined up already, and took him out. Incredible in depth reporting by the MSM. Like dogs with a bone they were. Not to mention amazing work they did on the COVID response fiasco and the even greater COVID vax genocide. Yes. The MSM does stellar work so often. That’s why we all support it as we do. (IE. We ignore it.)
A completely unserious response, especially having the gall to use the word genocide (with no proof) regarding a successful vaccination program, when an actual genocide is happening. I think your comment and attention should be directed to the platform that begins with a Q.
The Covid Vax is the worst medical disaster in human history. Likely 20M dead already with 100M-200M seriously injured. So bad and yet it continues. The Medical Industrial Complex continues to push it. They are now intentionally killing people. Well, they were all along. But some naive trusting people probably believed it. No one with a functioning brain can still believe it.
Wow...okay. source??
There are mountains of proof. MSM calls it misinformation so that their viewership/readership can arrogantly sniff at it as being "conspiracy theories." One day it shall be uncovered for what it was.
I like your sarcastic mind. You had me until the "counter sniper" line.
sure media like that is important but the way it is used or not used is not honorable.
2 sundays ago i watched meet the press which purports to report the important things that week. I expected to see some mention of the Iranian missiles raining down because this attack was days earlier, remember the image? Not important enough, but whatever Trump did or said deserved 2/3 of their program bashing.
BoBo, I am with you on this one. Tired of hearing Trump stuff 24/7 (because not a fan, and.just.tired.). On the practical side, a) Trump stuff gets attention which helps spin ad dollars and b) there is only so much time in a TV news or discussion segment - they cannot cover every major happening as it happens. Editorial decisions.
Do you really believe there's investigative media in MSM? That's super laughable!! A few Substack journalists do more work and value added publication than all the legacy parrots. Parrots for the DNC.
Precisely!
Traditional media and has covered up and ignored major stories on everything from Hunter Biden's laptop to Covid. They've also lied about Russiagate and the Ukraine.
I would hardly call those "whiffs", those are harmful to our society and democracy.
Musk hasn't been lucky, he's been govt funded. As was Bezos. Again you won't find stories in this in traditional media, but a bit of digging means even the average Joe can find the facts out. So why can't "traditional media".
The fact is the public are onto the way traditional media works to manipulate them and they aren't having it, and that's why it will die.
Exactly.
“Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite problem. They produce quality work…”
Nah.
Quality work would be supported. If it isn’t don’t blame social media.
Amen my Russian broski 🙏 im,a Ukrainian immigrant to America by the way!!! Hate this globalist created war in Ukraine against two brother countries. We need to annihilate all globalists.
This war is the worst thing I have seen the West do politically. I feel for Ukraine. It is evil.
💯
Absolutely. And the use of algorithms needs to remain limited as well. Let a true network of people who connect and communicate pass on good discoveries or poor quality writers to avoid. I find more thinkers from reading the comments of those who I follow already but in some cases those new discoveries are out of left field. Algorithms trying to guess what I want is a Twitter thing. We don’t want that.
Algo: “We think you might like…”
Me: “You don’t know me!”
It starts in “journalism school” WTF that is. They are so covered in their own fecal matter the smell becomes like perfume to them.
Nah. When all the Dailies shut down or get bought by private equity firms they will just run AI-generated pablum that informs but keeps the IQ needed down to maybe an average 6th grader's comprehension level.
It looks like quite basic supply and demand, to me. There's a higher supply than ever of journalism (the vast majority of which can be accessed for free), meaning that organisations like WaPo can only extract money from the demand for high-quality journalism specifically, which is low-ish.
Just because there's not a market for something that makes it financially viable to provide a quality product doesn't mean the product wasn't of good quality. (I very much doubt the best painted portrait of me in the world would command a sufficiently high price to pay the artist above minimum wage, either, even if the artist was excellent.)
One of the harsh realities of the world is that it's not enough for something you offer to be *good* for it to work as a product. The entire business model has to be viable, not just the quality of the offering.
These papers started bleeding money when they decided to vilify half of their readership. Those readers did the only rational thing they could, they took their dollars and left. When your the umpire, you don’t wear the uniform of one of the teams, you call balls and strikes. That’s the real underlying issue here. The rest is just a channel issue on how to deliver your product. If your product is crap, no channel or group of channels will save you.
These papers started bleeding money when they 1) lost their classified sections and 2) trained readers that online content should be free.
Finally, somebody who understands what happened in J-world. WaPo, NYT, etc., damaged mid- and small town newspapers by telling the world “a free press means our product is free.” Thus, for years it prevented all other papers (except the Wall Street Journal) from being able to justify charging for an online subscription. The economic concept “Free is not a business model” was beyond their concept-processing ability.
Sure.
That's like a demonstrable fact. You can go look at subscription rates and revenues that dropped off a cliff in about 2002/2003.
You need to read up on the concept of materiality. Just because something happens, doesn’t make it the driving force behind a trend. Among other things I’m a Chartered Financial Analyst and the main driver on losing readers across all channels, and hence money, is the vilification of half of your readership. Classified ad revenue is easily replaced with online advertising and the subscription model is still the driving force with these publications. Their revenue is decreasing because subscriptions are decreasing. I actually pay for more content now than I did before the digitalization of these media. You’re talking a false narrative at face value.
Subscription revenue was always the smallest piece of the revenue pie. Classifieds were top, then ads, then subs. And online ads cost a lot less than print ads. Throw in the aforementioned giving away of content for free and the whole industry model imploded 25 years ago. You can argue, if you want, that subscriptions could be higher (although I attest not high enough to break even for most publications of this size). But the industry cratered long before we got to our current ideological divide.
How hard is it for you to understand this? Conservatives and libertarians are being vilified by these publications and have voted with their dollars. WaPo brought in an Englishman who point blank told these leftist retards that nobody is trading their garbage. You can’t attack 50%+ of your customer base and not expect to take a massive hit. They are bleeding out money over the last 10 years or so because they decided to insult and vilify their customers.
My issue as a reader, rather than consumer of screaming podcasts, was that for decades I asked my far right friends for ANY written source of news. There were none worth reading. While I quite agree that most written news is very left slanted, there seems to be NO true right or balanced mid sources of written content in paper form. Why? If folks are voting their pocketbook at least a few living dinosaurs red papers should exist?
Bezos's op-ed correctly identified that many Americans perceive the WaPo to be biased. It left unspoken the fact that many Americans feel this way because the WaPo is, in fact, biased. It's hard to identify a business model that would work when there is a significant disconnect between the product as promised and the product as delivered.
I call bullshit newspapers, have declared endorsements for president for decades. It’s handled by a department completely separate from the journalists that’s how it’s always been handled. He did this because he’s a coward — because if Trump manages to weasel his criminal ass back into the White House, he thinks it will spare him and the Washington Post — That’s where he’s wrong. He also doesn’t want his space company to be left out of government contracts. Another billionaire Asshole.
Yup, doesn’t take a brilliant investigative journalist to figure this one out. Weasel gonna weasel.
What a pearl of wisdom
I have a better solution to not appearing biased — *stop being biased*
Hey Geof Sawaya, everybody has a bias: we can correct for that by being self-aware and open minded. It's hard work, though, but good exercise.
Can an organization that's 95% composed of Harris voters and 90% registered Democratic subscribers avoid bias though? It's rather different than individual efforts toward intellectual honesty. A better question: would such an organization ever WANT to avoid bias? Or would it just want to hide it?
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-flailing-elites?r=1neg52
James - I see your comment replying to me (thank you) and link to your substack which I hope to have time to read at some point ( right now ain’t a good time). I must say that I am not a journalist so my views are those of an outsider.
It’s hard not to see the decision not to endorse Harris as anything but one of self-interest — Bezos’s own considerable other business interests aside, the only viable business model the Post has found in the past decade has been covering Trump.
Yes. Jeff has a lot of overhead and he didn’t want to kill the golden goose.
The bias is evident to everyone. Why would anyone (except for the true believers), subscribe to something when the take is ideologically driven. There is not anything interesting when you know the content before you read it.
Ask those tuning into Fix News every evening. They settled out of court for close to $1B in the recent past over lies and conspiring emails to prove it. I didn’t hear a peep from the right over that.
Let's face it, news consumers prefer validation over facts. Critical thought is on life support.
Here is my peep. We need paper ballots and ID’s. If you can blow up a pager in Syria, you can create cheating with a computer.
This has nothing to do with my statement. Did I hit too close to home? Voting in the United States is stable. Sixty of the sixty-one court cases in ‘20-’21 proved that outright. Are you still watching Fox News?
Nearly all the cases were dropped and never had a chance to have evidence presented. If anyone thinks this nation would ever admit to election fraud be it red or blue team does not understand how politics and control over the people works. Think the government has ever investigated itself and found itself guilty? Think they would just say oh well we cheated now here is your new president regardless of whether red or blue was in office? That would prove we live in a banana republic and would risk a revolution. They will double and triple down regardless of what evidence is out there. Paper ballots and ID is definitely the way to go with both red and blue counting them together. An internet connected voting machine with software that has never been allowed to have the code audited does not pass the smell test. But I digress voting does not matter as we always select a zionist first America last traitor shill who advances the NWO agenda.
No facts.
All opinions.
Wow, RIghtsider - so many wrongs. in one long paragraph..maybe you should change your handle to wrongsider (just kidding, ok?).
Question: "NWO" - is that "New World Order"? What is that supposed to be? Asking for a friend.
Seriously though, voting does matter. We just don't get everything we want.
Baaahhhhh some more for us ok? Select your demociding sheep herder tax slave master and see how it works out for you. Both red and blue zionist sheep herders leads to the same slaughter house.
Even Jimmy Carter with his “STUDY” best election integrity is paper ballots and ID
I have a problem with the corporate ownership of the news media. The change in rules during GW Bush’s term by Powell is what messed it all up. Restore the media ownership regulations and the integrity of the news media will be restored.
Where the mess started was with the un-patriot act.
And then there is Citizens United. So much damage to undo.
Boycott the rich.
We can go without Amazon.
We can boycott WaPo and cancel subscriptions.
We can boycott Elon and Twitter X and those ugly cars of his.
We can.
We must vote with our wallets as well!
This is a cute rebellious rhetoric, however, unless you are willing to live like a Tibetan monk, you'll need to find viable alternatives for the products and services these companies offer. Unfortunately, more often than not there aren't many.
You don’t know me very well or at all. It is way more than cute rebellious rhetoric.
I have lived off grid for 10 years.
In an RV; 32 feet of bliss.
I didn’t say do not buy products. I said boycott Amazon.
I can still go to a local store and shop at the local mom and pop trading post.
Keep my money and barter local.
Pay cash.
Support local indie artists, bands, breweries and shops.
See their is a difference. It takes effort. It’s easy to tap tap tap and it shows up at your door.
It takes more effort to get off the couch and go drag you butt into a shop and talk with the shopkeeper.
We need more like me!
Yes. I have a day job.
Yes I put myself through college.
Life is hard.
It takes effort !
There is a universal boycott to Amazon stArting Nov 5 and going to Dec 5th , many say their boycotting until Jan 6 after holidays. . Get em where it hurts
I don't need to know you. I'm just replying to your statement which doesn't reflect the realty of the majority. Kudos to you for the lifestyle you chose and are able to maintain and enjoy it. It's not for everyone. There are too many people who are not in a position to take that path, whether due to their jobs, family or other personal or practical reasons. For many of them the boycotts you're calling for are simply not their reality.
Respectfully, when people say "boycott amazon", "boycott mcdonalds", "boycott cocoa cola" we are directing these calls of action to the middle class, ESPECIALLY upper middle class who LITERALLY have the time & money & ability to avoid these businesses and spend their money more local and more responsibly. No one in their right mind would yell at people living in poverty "hey stop buying crap from walmart and mcdonalds".
Its actually easy to make better decisions that help, and every little action helps, however insignificant or naive you may think it is.
You just have to decide to be a better person 🤷🏻♀️
And their all reading WaPo!
Good answers. Wouldn't trade my lifestyle for yours, but sounds like you are happy, spa go for it.
I quit Amazon in 2015. Nope, didn’t even use it during COVID-19 era.
Not a small feat, but since we're bragging, I quit TV 20 years ago and never looked back. The healthiest boycott ever.
Indeed!
I am boycotting Tesla by default, I can't afford those ugly cars . I do best to maintain what I have, kinda like what the Cubans were forced to do.
*don't know why this is in past tense, Cuba is still a mess for most Cubans
Effective boycotts are not simply stopping buying stuff, they must have a stated purpose in mind: "Save the Hedgehogs or we will boycott your french fries" (feel free to substitute your own special interest causes). Boycotting the WaPo might be in protest of their non-endoresemnt policy, but it could be self-defeating if you rely in them for news. You probably know who you should vote for anyway, so what's the prob? Just saying.
Yeah dude the purpose is 86ing the concept of trillionaires or multi-billionaires; another concept- "boycott amazon to save _____ (insert a dozen different things- local book stores, your community. the literal Amazon rainforest, the USPS, etc)"; no one in the entire world ONLY has access to the washington post, thats absurd. If someone is priveleged enough to receive western media they likely have daily free or very affordable access to a handful of publications. Honestly your entire comment is so.....ick. But take care ✌️🫶🏼
That's the ticket DJ! Put thousands of people out of work -- that'll show Bezos!
...... It will. We cannot keep lining billionaires pockets. Period. (Ps your whole vibe is rude. Be kind)
Gigi - "We cannot keep lining billionaires pockets" is a nice thought, but changing our tax system to be more progressive -- with more tax brackets designed for those with household incomes over say 1 million a year -- would put more dollars into the Treasury (and help pay down debt) while achieving the socially useful goal of not enriching the already obscenely rich.
Currently, the top tax bracket is 37% on earned income on households making $731k/yr. That is pretty cushy but not billionaire-class money. To take an extreme example, Elon Musk's wealth grows by over $14 BILLION a year (not all is taxable as income, though). Jeff Bezos' wealth grows by a :measly" 9.6 BILLION a year. Boycotts might hurt these guys' feelings, but their bank accounts? Not so much.
I do agree that e-tailing has hurt small retailers -- and big ones, too (think Barnes & Noble) -- but rather than mobilizing for a boycott, just encourage consumers to buy locally or use their favorite store's online sales. (Yeah, I am well aware that many small shops market their goods through Amazon).
Thats why i said it is not either or, it's BOTH. I think you misunderstood me (and none of what you just typed out is new information for me.)
We don't have to think in such binary terms. You can properly tax the uber-wealthy AND put dollars into small business and local economies.
✌️ gonna bow out of this conversation now, take care 🙏
Kudos for "Be kind".
Disagree on "cannot keep lining billionaires' pockets" by means of boycotts. A fairer tax system would help - not that billionaires should be taxed out of existence -- without them (actually without Elon and Jeff we wouldn't have much of a space program.
Also fck anyone who wears a "colonize Mars" tshirt, they can catch these hands. I dont want or need space programs. Especially if their existence is contingent on exploitation.
It👏🏼is👏🏼not👏🏼either👏🏼or👏🏼- it is both.
Thanks for the convo.
Absolute nonsense. The Post continues to endorse down-ballot candidates so the whole self-serving twaddle about “bias” rings hollow. This was nothing more than Bezos acting in his own self interest and trying to split the baby.
Twaddle indeed!
"Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite problem. They produce quality work, but ..."
No. They do not produce quality work.
Can't like this enough. This post by Mackenzie is exactly wrong pretty much every point. As those unemployed hack "journalists" migrate to Substack, which is just another subscription platform for writers (yknow, like a newspaper... but electronic), they'll just keep making...and pumping out their bilge as it too begins to sag below the waterline. It's the same thing as when California residents flee their increasingly unaffordable and dystopian cities and just continue to support the same policies that drove them to leave in all their new digs. Eventually, you're going to run out of places to flee. And the funds will dry up. And, unfortunately for the country, patience also eventually will run out, too. Americans have forgotten, because it's been 140 years or so, and our education system is infected by the same mendacity as journalism, that even politics are limited. But history itself is a teacher. And the lessons will be hard ones.
And everything is no good, bad and rotten in this best of all possible worlds, (or at least the best of all possible G7 economies)....
You totally missed addressing the problem. You could’ve kept that whole piece very short all you needed to say was that the timing was terrible. If he had done this a year ago, it would’ve been fine if he did it a week after the election that would’ve been fine.
I've seen this many times the last few days. Explain why waiting a week would be more acceptable? It would render taking such a position irrelevant.
The Opinion Editor and the Editorial Board did the work they were asked to do and then the owner interfered in their work. If you want to rethink the existence of the Opinion pages, I'd be all for it, honestly. I hate opinion writing. And I hate endorsements. But I hate owner interference in content even more. Post-election is a traditional time for beat reassignments and other coverage change decisions. It would have been great to sit down with the Opinion staff and Editorial Board and say, "let's rethink how we're doing this." I'd honestly have been so happy with that outcome.
Unfortunately for the owner they eat the costs and if a paper isn't selling because their staff are ideological dickheads instead of objective observers then said owner is personally obligated to act. Otherwise, the staff can pony up the $250M to buy the owner out of they feel their model reflects a winning strategy.
The owner of a paper is almost always going to eat the costs. The revenue stream dried up with the loss of classifieds and the lower cost of online ads.
Also, I'm not sure how your comment is at all responding to anything I said. Like I keep reading it and I think maybe you're responding to someone else? It's not germane.
I think perhaps you're too far up your perspective to comprehend what you are saying in both replies.
Huh? I don't understand what *I'm* saying? M'kay.
Whoawhoawhoa, Elizabethetc -- I LOVE reading opinions and Op-Eds. Them (especially good editorial cartoons), crosswords and the Comix page make the oar worthwhile for me. Pleas don't pu his the suggestion box.
No one is ever going to take my suggestion, don't worry. There are far more readers who share your tastes than mine.
Well, OK then. See ya.
it would accomplish the long-term goal of getting the newspaper out of the endorsing business without having almost as much affect by not endorsing at this late stage. this non-endorsement at this late stage when it was very well expected that they would be endorsing. Harris is in fact a fainthearted endorsement of Trump to many people.
LMAO
Clever!
Tim R - Good point.
I don’t like the decision, don’t believe Bezos’ explanation. But, 1) the loss of 200,000 subs will hurt the post and reporters, won’t hurt Bezos. 2) What might get Bezos’ attention: the loss of 200,000 Amazon buyers. But everyone knows we can give up our news, can’t give up our stuff. So no talk of Amazon boycott.
Perhaps this is similar to when Netflix announced they were no longer mailing DVDs. People freaked out and customers bailed. Years later, they were the leaders in streaming content. I don’t read the WP and likely never will. That said, I can see the need to legacy media to make changes if there is any hope for a future. The other option is to continue to cater to a shrinking number of customers while losing out to new journalism, aka Substack and podcasts.
The problem is it appears more and more people want actual journalism instead of party line propaganda. It’s going to be difficult to change the mindset of an organization back to performing actual journalism.
I think the opposite is true. More and more people just want to read opinion pieces that support their existing worldview and nobody wants to read straight news anymore unless it's some kind of grisly crime story or a celebrity died.
Well, actually— many of us are also ditching Amazon Prime, and boycotting Whole Foods. And 200k cancelled subscriptions is not chump change, nor is it likely the end of subscribers abandoning ship.
lol...how many is "many of us." Is it like most of us, a lot of us, scores of us, plenty of us, my whole family and then some?
Well, actually -75% of US shoppers have a Prime membership. Well actually, Amazon has 200 million members. I wonder what the number was before "many" ditched Prime.
The knee-jerk reactions of emoprogs never disappoint. They learn nothing and hurt us all presuming to know what they prove they don’t know.
Amazon has 180 million Prime subscribers plus all the people who buy from them without a subscription. Good luck getting their attention. And Bezos only owns 9% of them so he really, really doesn't care. And 200k WaPo subscribers is less than 10%, and it's already bleeding money, so you're all just increasing his tax write off or getting more people laid off. So quit, but don't think anyone cares but you.
Our newsroom stopped endorsements a decade ago when we found it didn't inform readers; it only divided them and led to spiteful comments and voting. Instead, we used the editorial page to lay out major policies of each platform. That's the purpose of journalism: to inform.
Which newsroom is that?
In any event, I doubt that anyone (OK, maybe there are a few clueless saps) votes based on who a newspaper endorses. Which will always be the Democrat. Always. So, what's the point?
That's not true. Plenty of newspapers endorsed Romney, McCain, and both Bushes.
I for one am not comfortable with the idea that we should depend on the whims of billionaires to maintain vital institutions and determine the public good. Good for whom?
Good thing you don't know about the Hearst or Murdoch familes, or Robert Maxwell, then.
Are you kidding? They are practically the type specimens for the problem. Let’s not forget the family behind Sinclair Broadcasting either.
Or Taylor, the founder of the Manchester Guardian.
Someone needs to explain to Jeff Bezos why a newspaper has an Opinion section… or perhaps he’s knows that, and his refusal to allow his paper’s endorsement of VP Harris is all about staying on Trump’s good side to receive critical government contracts for his fledgling space toy.
His claim that distrust of the media is caused by newspapers endorsing one candidate over the other is nonsense. Newspapers have written editorials - a short essay or column that delivers each newspaper’s institutional statement of opinion - since Horace Greeley founded the New York Tribune in 1841. Candidate endorsement began in 1860, when the New York Times endorsed Lincoln. All of a sudden, after over 15O years, voters distrust institutional statements of opinion? Hogwash.
Yep. When you can successfully rewrite history, I suppose everything else is relatively easy.
You can only successfully rewrite history if the public is historically illiterate.