<\/p>\n
Jeff Bezos sometimes makes agreeing with him very difficult. This was the case earlier this week when he said in an interview with CNBC that President Donald Trump was \u201cmore mature\u201d in his second term than his first and that Amazon\u2019s commission of the Melania documentary was in no way whatsoever an attempt at \u201cbuying influence\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is profoundly depressing that one of the features of this age is that those in positions of influence feel able to tell us that day is night and night is day and expect us to believe them.<\/p>\n
But anyway, he said something else in the interview with which I do agree \u2013 and whose importance was only underlined by another announcement this week.<\/p>\n
In the interview, Bezos talked for the first time about the cuts that had been made at the Washington Post, which he owns. Questioned about why they were necessary and why he couldn\u2019t just run the Post as a trust, he said: \u201cThe Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. Let me tell you why. Because it\u2019s a measure of its relevance. If people won\u2019t pay for our product, it\u2019s not a good enough product.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes, yes, and thrice yes. More than an owner\u2019s approval, more than an editor saying they liked it, more than any award, the truest marker of the quality of your work is that people value it enough to pay for it.<\/p>\n
You might think Bezos is going about producing that kind of journalism at the Post in an odd way, but he\u2019s right to point out to America\u2019s journalists that they need to find a sustainable market for their work. Too often they have comforted themselves that they have a (self-appointed) constitutional role as the \u201cfourth estate\u201d and so everything they do is valuable in that it is holding the government to account or \u201cspeaking truth to power\u201d. I\u2019m afraid that I agree with Bezos when he says that actually it is profits that are the \u201csignal that we are providing a relevant service\u201d.<\/p>\n
This becomes all the more relevant now that it looks like Google is turning off the blue link traffic pump. Its changes to search announced this week mean that news organisations will need to fight harder to prove their relevance over a period of time. The flow of drive-by visitors who once sustained ad models and filled up subscription funnels (then to be onboarded with cheap or free offers) will likely slow to a trickle over time. If every search query is met with a pretty complete LLM-like answer, then you need a very good reason to convince you to visit a news site.<\/p>\n
Some may lament the change from the days of print or early digital when journalists could largely do their work without reference to a profit motive at all. But the world has changed, will continue to change at greater speed and, as Adam Tinworth puts it in his excellent One Man & HIs Blog<\/a>, \u201cnostalgia is not a business model\u201d.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this is a lost cause. To win in this market environment, news organisations just need to be hyper-focused on the value they are providing to readers in every single article. They will have fewer opportunities to sell what they are doing and they will need to make them count. But I fully believe that when done well the uniqueness and texture of reporting done by humans is worth paying for.<\/p>\n What does this mean in practice? At its simplest, it\u2019s about recognising who your readers are and what they want from you. Take a look at any publishers\u2019 data and you\u2019ll see that the industry is fulfilling those needs unevenly, at best. A good practical starting point will be cutting the journalism that is not resonating with people and doubling down on the kind that is. The good news is that generally that is exactly the kind of distinctive, revelatory and analytical journalism that most of us came into the profession to do.<\/p>\n