Bezos, Baron and The Washington Post

Past, Present and What Now?

In the 1970s, when great stories like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate were unfolding, a shorthand developed to describe newspapers’ elite tier: “Times and Post.”

Every night after the close of the first edition, the news desks in New York and Washington would exchange a facsimile of their front pages, for a comparison on the play of that day’s lead pieces and exclusives.

I was at the Washington Post. We always considered ourselves in an advertising line of the period, Avis to the New York Times’s Hertz. So, we tried harder.

I was surprised to read in Adam Nagourney’s new book The Times How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journlism, that the Post’s successes, especially on Watergate were unnerving to the Times’s self-regard.

The Post was led by the glamorous, charismatic editor Ben Bradlee, who favored what he called, with a grin, “creative tension” as a motivator. The Times’s editor was the brilliant, intense Abe Rosenthal, who ran roughshod over his staff to stay on top.

That was all a half century ago, and amazingly the Times-Post dynamic still prevails when describing what is called, usually in deprecation, MSM (mainstream media) by people who are not.

The coincidence of Nagourney’s book and Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post in the same season solicits comparisons to share because of my more than working knowledge of both institutions.

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I found the most unexpected aspect of Baron’s book to be his portrayal of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, one of the world’s richest men, and considered in many quarters (book publishing, for instance) to be ruthless and fixated on what he is alleged to have said (I don’t have the exact quote): “Your margin is my opportunity.”

From the moment Bezos bought the Post in 2013 from the Graham family for what was considered a bargain price of $250 million, he committed to being totally hands-off from the news operation.

By Baron’s account, he was faithful to his word. He was deeply engaged on the business side, having to restore the Post to profitability. He used his tactical skills and instincts to reinvent what was a newspaper supported by locally based advertising into a digital and global enterprise.

Coverage of Amazon, and of Bezos personally, was never an issue for the Post. He was a newsmaker in his own right, regularly vilified by Donald Trump and living through a tabloid-driven saga of divorce and new romance.

It was amusing to recall that when the very young Bezos stopped in at the Post in the 1990s to pitch the paper’s tech columnist on his idea for Amazon as a start-up on line book retailer, he was essentially blown off.

As it happens, I worked with Bezos on a book called Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, co-published by PublicAffairs and Harvard Business Review Press in 2020. My experience, although significantly less extensive than Baron’s, was similar.

He was very busy. You don’t just drop in on Jeff Bezos. But when he gave you his carefully managed time, he was completely focused. He read every word of the book and approved Walter Isaacson’s ten-thousand-word introduction without making a change. The title was his and he chose it over the one we had recommended. His was better.

I needed Bezos’s personal signature on the contract (so it would not be dismissed as Amazon propaganda) and his commitment to give every cent of his royalties to a nonprofit. It took weeks to arrange the necessary half hour on a Friday. But we got the signature.

When the book was published, I asked Bezos to sign a copy for my teenage grandsons. He sent me four: one each for the boys; one unsolicited for my son, Evan, whose work in The New Yorker he admired; and one for me (blush), with a flattering inscription about my work in the book.

In Baron’s telling, Post reporters who had received public accolades heard from Bezos, who had read their stories. Bezos could have spent more time with the Post’s news staff, Baron writes, but when he did, he was completely supportive in word and deed.

Since Baron’s departure in 2021, the Post has lost money because of a post-Trump presidency loss of digital subscribers and what was apparently an over-optimistic forecast of revenues.

Bezos wrote to the staff a few weeks ago to laud their continuing work, adding that a return to profitability is essential because that is the way you know readers appreciate what you are offering them.

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I worked for Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham for eighteen years as a reporter and editor. Having been a newsroom colleague of Bradlee’s successor, Leonard Downie Jr., and then responsible for his memoir All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post at PublicAffairs, and having read Baron’s book with care and talking to him about it, I feel qualified to assess his tenure compared to his predecessors.

Bradlee’s years were the Post’s rise to glory. Downie’s years were what Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher, might have considered “cruising speed,” which was his goal until the business and classified advertising collapsed and the Post as well as Newsweek had to be sold off.

Baron arrived and assessed the scale of the problem; once Bezos took over, he used his vast editorial talents to reenergize the organization. He benefited from the election of Trump, who declared war on the media generally and what he called the “Amazon Washington Post”  because of the scrutiny he was getting from the paper.

Baron came up with a classic retort: “We’re not at war; we’re at work.”

After considering other options for a motto for the Post, Bezos chose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to adorn the masthead. Bezos and Baron had successfully branded the Post for the Trump era.

There were, of course, significant differences between the Bradlee-Downie years and the Baron years. Rules and styles in the newsroom adjusted with the generations. Restlessness among women and Blacks for better representation increased to demands. Social media, #MeToo, and the murder of George Floyd made these issues increasingly acute.

Baron did his best to navigate these matters but by his own account never really succeeded.

Bradlee and Downie in their leadership, and reflected in their memoirs, used their backgrounds as a way of telling staff who they were. Bradlee, a World War II naval veteran, a close pal of John F. Kennedy when he was in the White House, and a national superstar after All the President’s Men was released, had cachet.

Downie, by contrast, was a proud graduate of Ohio State who had started at the Post as an intern in 1964 and rose to the top without social connections or a vivid public presence. As his book title proclaimed, he was all about the story.

Baron came to the Post as a star. The Boston Globe’s revelations under his editing about the Catholic Church in Boston, and the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, made him famous.

But to the best of my knowledge, and in his book, Baron was forceful in presence but somewhat inaccessible personally. In an age when identities – who you say you are or seem to be – is so important, Baron held himself at a distance from the staff, which he came to understand was a problem. It was striking to read his description of the emotional and physical stress he endured in the later years at the helm.

Bradlee, Downie, and Baron were exceptional newsroom leaders and much of the Post’s stature over the years was a result of that. First there was the backing of the Grahams, and when that was spent, the remarkable and continuing role of Bezos.

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Baron was replaced as editor by Sally Buzbee, who came from the Associated Press, where she managed a large staff and was experienced in digital journalism. She was chosen over any of Baron’s senior staff and was an outsider, which was compounded by the impact of Covid.  When a number of Post luminaries left for the Times, among other places, and rumors of a decline in subscribers went public, morale took a dive.

Bezos replaced the publisher, Fred Ryan (who had been successful until he wasn’t) with Patty Stonesifer, whose career at Microsoft, as the first president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a board member of Amazon, and the wife of the greatly admired journalist Michael Kinsley gave her instant credibility with the staff. Once again, it showed that Bezos was paying attention.

As interim publisher, Stonesifer’s job was to calm things down and choose a successor: Will Lewis. His background, which includes leading the Wall Street Journal under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and other lofty positions, suggests that he knows the challenges ahead.

Lewis is British as is the Journal’s new editor, Emma Tucker; Anna Wintour, the chief of content at Conde Nast; and Mark Thompson, who has arrived to turn around CNN, the same role he was said to have played as CEO of the New York Times Company.

Is there meaning to this British invasion of the highest end of American journalism? Brits are thought to be self-deprecating on the whole, but when it comes to journalism, American owners must think they are pretty good at it.

Next week: Triumph and Troubles at The New York Times