Aug 17th 2013

Citizen Bezos?

by Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson, CEO of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, health care, private aviation, and space travel.

NEW YORK – My very first serious job was as a fact-checker for Forbes magazine (now mostly a laissez-faire collection of blogs). I consider fact-checkers to be the altar boys of journalism. And, despite having left the church, I still feel a profound reverence for the holy truth.

So, in most of the discussion about business models occasioned by the sale of the Washington Post to Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the values that I have held dear are being tarnished. How so?

Even reputable fact-checkers disagree on the origin of the famous admonition to journalists: “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable!” (They even disagree on whether it was first directed at preachers or at newsmen). In any case, journalism is one business in which the customer is not always right. 

The challenge that business considerations pose to journalism – both news and commentary providers – takes the form of three separate temptations: to slant the news to please readers rather than inform them, and thus attract advertisers; to slant the news to please advertisers directly; and to slant the news to advance owners’ political or commercial interests. These temptations have always been present, but “hard” news could be supported by constituency-pleasing sections, advertiser-pleasing features and product reviews, news-you-can-use sections replete with ads for related goods, and, of course, the classified ads.

Today, the church of newspaper journalism is fragmenting. Brands and advertisers can speak directly to customers, and markets no longer need the convening power of a newspaper to match buyers and sellers (the purpose of classified ads). 

Investigative journalism and serious commentary, like religion, do not have a profit model. They serve a higher purpose (although they can be and often are corrupted or twisted for bad ends).

So, should we welcome Bezos’s entry into this world? Many commentators expect him to digitize-monetize-revolutionize the Post (whatever that means). But I think he bought it for a different purpose. He is a canny businessman – that much is clear. He runs Amazon tightly and for the long term; it generates huge amounts of cash, which it reinvests on behalf of all of its shareholders.

But it is Bezos personally, not Amazon, who bought the Post. This is a man who is a generous donor to the Long Now Foundation (I am on its board) and who personally founded and owns a rocket company, Blue Origin (I am on the board of a competing company called XCOR). 

I think – I hope! – that Bezos will make the proper distinctions. He understands the difference between media (yet another of his personal investments is the Web site Business Insider) and journalism.

In our market-driven times, we tend to think about the price of everything and the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde put it. But we are also discovering behavioral economics – the human quirks and emotional urges that drive people to do things that make little economic sense. The best joke of all – that Bezos bought the Post by mistake through an errant one-click purchase (a capability patented by Amazon) – has a ring of truth to it. The purchase was not an economically motivated decision, though it was no mistake. 

There probably is not a sustainable business model for newspapers like the Post. But I do think there is sustainable value of the kind that no corporation or financially driven investor could ever justify.

Bezos’s move is not like the recent purchases of Newsweek, where there was an illusion of turning it around, or the Boston Globe, bought by John Henry, who owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team and Liverpool Football Club. Perhaps the most interesting example is Rupert Murdoch – the son of an Australian news baron – who recently split his family-controlled News Corporation, into the TV and film company 21st Century Fox and the less profitable new News Corp, which retains the news and publishing operations. 

Although Murdoch remains chairman of both, everyone expects him to focus more on the news business. That portfolio includes both customer-pleasing tabloids with a troubled history of pandering, spying, and bribing, and the venerable journalism of the Wall Street Journal’s news pages – a contradiction that splitting the parent has not resolved.

And, finally, there is Project Syndicate itself (which publishes this column). Originally funded by yet another billionaire, George Soros, Project Syndicate operates independently to provide hard-to-monetize informed opinion and analysis with nary an “advertorial” or product review in sight. 

One way to think about the best business model for journalism is to think about the best business model for food. Is it an all-you-can-eat buffet? A tony à la carte sanctuary with great wines that generate most of the profit? A franchise with pre-cooked dishes thawed and heated in huge ovens? All can work – but only with good management.

But there is also the philanthropic soup kitchen – in the Post’s case, a high-end one, delivering nutritious food in a world in which restaurants now give away less-healthy food, because they use it to sell other goods. 

In the end, I think Bezos wants less to own the Post than to set it free, for at least a generation or two. As Bezos wrote in a memo to the staff: “The values of the Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads....” If I am wrong, I hope this commentary will help to afflict him into righteousness!

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.
www.project-syndicate.org

 


This article is brought to you by Project Syndicate that is a not for profit organization.

Project Syndicate brings original, engaging, and thought-provoking commentaries by esteemed leaders and thinkers from around the world to readers everywhere. By offering incisive perspectives on our changing world from those who are shaping its economics, politics, science, and culture, Project Syndicate has created an unrivalled venue for informed public debate. Please see: www.project-syndicate.org.

Should you want to support Project Syndicate you can do it by using the PayPal icon below. Your donation is paid to Project Syndicate in full after PayPal has deducted its transaction fee. Facts & Arts neither receives information about your donation nor a commission.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Apr 13th 2022
EXTRACTS" "Ukraine and Russia produce a substantial amount of grain and other food for export. Ukraine alone produces a whopping 6% of all food calories traded in the international market. At least it used to, before it was invaded by the world’s largest nuclear power." ...... "When it comes to cereals like wheat, corn, rice and barley, the big players talk about millions of metric tonnes, or MMTs. A single MMT of wheat contains about 3.4 trillion food calories,." ....."Ukraine produced about 80 MMT of grain (a category that includes wheat, corn and barley) in 2021, and is expected to harvest less than half of that this year. A shortfall of 40 MMT is enough missing calories that a country like the UK could only make it up by having everyone stop eating for three years. That’s the thing about tonnes of grain: a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’ve got a real issue on your plate."
Apr 11th 2022
EXTRACT: "I don’t even know the little girl’s name. All I do know is what a friend of a friend wrote on Viber: that her relative, a senior nurse in one of Kyiv’s hospitals, “saw in the morgue a child with 20 varieties of sperm on her small body.” Since this information was conveyed in a private conversation, there is no reason to doubt its veracity."
Apr 8th 2022
EXTRACT: "Russian society has so far failed to stop Putin, just as German society failed to stop Hitler. And so, like a poisoned chalice, that task has fallen to the West, as it did in 1939. The West must now treat Putin and his regime the same way that Winston Churchill treated Hitler: Don’t talk to him, just defeat him. Dead-enders such as Putin are too fanatical and desperate to be reliable negotiating partners."
Apr 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail. There is a strong possibility that Putin has only a limited idea of how badly his army is faring. So be it – he’ll find out soon enough that there is now no path for him to military victory."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Policymakers expected that the country would be able to secure its energy supply entirely from renewable sources, so they resolved to phase out coal and nuclear energy simultaneously. The last three of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants are set to be shut down this year." ---- ".... the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7%. And while wind and solar generated 29% of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption." ----- "If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems – on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely – and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down....."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "For Putin, the past that matters most is the one the dissident author and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exalted: the time when the Slavic peoples were united within the Orthodox Christian kingdom of Kievan Rus’. Kyiv formed its heart, making Ukraine central to Putin’s pan-Slavic vision. ---- But, for Putin, the Ukraine war is about preserving Russia, not just expanding it. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently made clear, Russia’s leaders believe that their country is locked in a “life-and-death battle to exist on the world’s geopolitical map.” That worldview reflects Putin’s longstanding obsession with works of other Russian emigrant philosophers, such as Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev, who described a struggle for the Eurasian (Russian) soul against the Atlanticists (the West) who would destroy it. ---- Yet Putin and his neo-Eurasianists seem to believe that the key to victory is to create the kind of regime those anti-Bolshevik philosophers most detested: one run by the security forces. A police state would fulfill the vision of another of Putin’s heroes: the KGB chief turned Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe, is struggling to export last year’s harvest, and may be unable to produce much this year either. In addition, the war has caused a global fertiliser shortage, which will push up food prices around the world too. Coming at a time when the global pandemic had already increased food insecurity and depleted resources around the world, many countries may not be resilient to a major food crisis brought on by the war. Back-to-back global catastrophic events like this have not happened for close to 100 years." ----- "Another useful analogue is the case of Germany during the first world war. When war broke out in 1914, the German authorities had anticipated a short conflict – not too dissimilar to Russian assumptions a few weeks ago. Just like in Ukraine now, the first world war severely disrupted German farming."
Mar 31st 2022
EXTRACT: "The horrors of World War II – the death camps, slave labor, and inhumane experiments on people – produced a global commitment never to permit such crimes to be repeated. This began a transformation of international politics whereby appreciation of the value of every person’s life and dignity ensured that even most authoritarian governments at least paid lip service to human rights.  ----- But the Soviet Union and many of its successor states, particularly Russia, never internalized this change. More than three decades after the USSR collapsed, most post-Soviet countries are still governed according to the old “imperial” paradigm. So, it should come as no surprise that we are now witnessing a clash between fundamentally different sets of values and ultimate goals for statehood."
Mar 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Referencing past legacies as a justification for present-day political decisions is often effective – such appeals trigger emotional reflexes and contribute to thinking about politics in terms of rivalry and defence. The irony within the tragedy of the current situation is that Putin will assuredly go down in history as the figure that did more to unite the Ukrainian people (albeit against Russia) than any other in recent memory."
Mar 24th 2022
EXTRACT: " Despite the death and destruction that Russia rains down daily on them, the vast majority of Ukrainians are bullish about the future: 77% believe the country is moving in the right direction, 93% think they can beat back Russia, and 47% expect to win in the next few weeks.  Ukrainian policymakers are no less bullish, driving a hard bargain in negotiations with the Russians. Several factors account for this remarkable optimism."
Mar 21st 2022
EXTRACT: "As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, China’s role has been thrown into sharp relief. Prior to the war, some commentators suggested that China would openly side with Russia or seek to act as a mediator – so far Beijing appears to have resisted doing either. As Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the US, wrote recently in the Washington Post, Beijing has nothing to gain from this war, arguing “wielding the baton of sanctions at Chinese companies while seeking China’s support and cooperation simply won’t work”. Ambassador Qin also stressed that Beijing had no prior knowledge of the conflict,...."
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "The second source of Russian power is of course the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons would not deliver victory in a conventional war, but they could destroy a country in the blink of an eye. This brings us to a terrifying question: What will Putin do when he realizes that he cannot win his war in Ukraine by conventional means?"
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "An influential Shanghai-based academic commentator on international affairs, Hu Wei, recently advanced a cautionary argument that has been circulated widely in Chinese-language publications. In his commentary, which is unlikely to have been published without the approval of some of Xi’s senior courtiers, Hu wondered how Chinese communists would react if the war escalated beyond Ukraine, or if Russia was clearly defeated." ------- "For Hu, the answer for China’s leaders is simple. They should wash their hands of the relationship with Putin, ....."
Mar 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Meanwhile, Xi seems to have realized that Putin has gone rogue. On March 8, one day after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had insisted that the friendship between China and Russia remained “rock solid,” Xi called French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to say that he supported their peacemaking efforts."
Mar 7th 2022
EXTRACTS: "........Russia has been isolated by draconian Western sanctions that could devastate its economy for decades,...." ---- "Russia’s prospects are bleak, at best; without China, it has none at all. China holds the trump card in the ultimate survival of Putin’s Russia."
Mar 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Although Ukraine’s armed forces are outnumbered by those of Russian President Vladimir Putin invading our country, we take heart from the growing support we are receiving from friends abroad. Nobody should forget that this is not just an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine; it is an assault on the free world. ---- Putin has been at war with the free world for decades. "
Mar 2nd 2022
EXTRACT: "Moreover, with China sharing the Kremlin’s interest in containing the advance of liberal democracy around the world, Putin could count on the Chinese to provide an additional economic lifeline by purchasing Russian gas. But this new relationship will not be costless. As the world continues to divide into separate technological and economic blocs, Russia will become even more dependent on China, implying a loss of strategic autonomy. Russia may have a powerful military; but with a GDP similar to that of Spain and Italy, it is far from being an economic power."
Mar 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "The financial measures just announced against Russia are unprecedented for a country of its size. This of course means it’s impossible to predict exactly how their impacts will reverberate around the Russian – and global – economy. And we still need to see the exact details of the plan. But on their face they threaten the collapse of the Russian ruble, a run on Russian banks, hyperinflation, a sharp recession and high levels of unemployment in Russia, as well as turmoil in international financial markets."
Feb 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Putin apparently assumes that China will back him. But while he launched the invasion just weeks after concluding something akin to an alliance agreement with Xi in Beijing, Chinese officials’ reactions have been very distant with calls for “restraint.” Given Putin’s near-total reliance on China for support in challenging the US-led international order, lying to Xi would have no political or strategic advantage. That is what is so worrying: Putin no longer seems capable of the calculations that are supposed to guide a leader’s decision-making. Far from an equal partner, Russia is now on track to become a kind of Chinese vassal state."
Feb 25th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Russia’s ascent to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in numerous tragedies not only for the neighbors it subjugated and gradually absorbed, but also for its own people. China’s current leaders, in particular, should be mindful of this history, considering that imperial Russia seized more territory from China than from anyone else." ----- "Putin is taking Russia hurtling back toward the nineteenth century, in search of past greatness, whereas China is forging ahead to become the defining superpower of the twenty-first century. While China has achieved unprecedentedly rapid economic and technological modernization, Putin has been pouring Russia’s energy-export revenues into the military, once again cheating the Russian people out of their future."