
Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post - Jerry2
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-takes-hands-on-role-at-washington-post-1450658089
======
roymurdock
> The website publishes an average of 1,200 pieces of content a day with
> increasing amounts geared toward social media. Recent examples include “15
> awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015” and a spoof video called
> “The Galactic Civil War” that tells the story of Star Wars as if it had been
> directed by documentarian Ken Burns.

> Analytics dashboards will soon be added to reporters’ computers, and traffic
> figures will eventually be looked at as part of performance reviews, Mr.
> Baron said.

Having traffic figures as a goalpost in journalist's performance reviews is
worrying. Especially when the company is churning out 1200 pieces a day.
Sounds like Bezos is pivoting the Washington Post from news to entertainment.
Hard to tell the difference these days.

~~~
pp19dd
Just to point this out, traffic _always_ drove shaping of journalism. That's
exactly how beats are established and budgeted. For example, typical metro
desk stories are always popular but not always overly staffed because the news
pretty much writes itself. Education takes more work, but it's not that
important to audience so you pick a person or two wisely to run it, maybe
throw a general assignment reporter on a few stories. Investigative pieces,
for those you throw your best people and if it's newsworthy - that is, in the
matter of public interest - you wastefully throw resources at it to get the
story out. You can't do that for every story though, so editorial meetings are
harsh.

The only difference is that for traditional print, the metrics lagged behind
by months to a year (these were done by circulation analysts or media analysis
companies that do this for a living, with lots of phone calls and even more
interpolation). With interpolation, you can imagine how you can under- or
overestimate a situation. With print interpolation, it's even worse: they
would ask people if they didn't read a newspaper this week, did they at least
glance at one that someone held, or left on a bench? If they said yes, they
got a checkmark for a partial reach. Based on these delayed and inaccurate
numbers, people sometimes got or lost their jobs. More often, they got
reassigned to do something else. It's always been like that.

Now, with near-realtime feedback, you better know how a piece or a series or a
section front is doing and can react to it in a more timely manner and make
adjustments (ex: throw more people on the project, or pull people away from it
and have them try something else). For example, ebola as a news topic is not
doing so well now because it's pretty much contained, so lets get that
reporter onto something else.

Don't assume that this modernization change is going to be a rowship with a
whip and a piper. Besos has a decent track record on enabling journalists to
do their job better, seen both from the outside and the inside. And yeah,
metrics can be misread, misused and misinterpreted, but that's always been a
possibility.

~~~
roymurdock
> “15 awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015” and a spoof video
> called “The Galactic Civil War”

I'm not sure you can call this "journalism". Sure, you're giving the people on
social media networks what they want: funny, linkbaity stuff they can share.
The pageview metrics will support and encourage that. But what individual
people want and what society needs is often misaligned, if not diametrically
opposed.

I think I'm just disappointed because quality journalism and investigation
takes time and is a losing business proposition, so it often requires patrons
with large pockets and an altruistic outlook. Bezos could have been that
patron. But it seems like he's going in the opposite direction with the
Washington Post for business/financial reasons. Not that I should have
expected anything else...it is a private company and not a gov-funded org or a
charity.

~~~
jahnu
Playing the Devil's Advocate here a little, but Garfield isn't journalism
either and we get that in newspapers.

~~~
roymurdock
We get 3 pages of comics (my favorite part of the newspaper, especially
bizarro, foxtrot, and marmaduke) and 30 pages of news. When you switch the
ratios, you're not running a newspaper anymore, you're running an
entertainmentpaper. Which is fine, as Rupert Murdoch has proven time and time
again.

~~~
criley2
>and 30 pages of news

That's unfair because those 30 pages of news also include Entertainment /
Celebrity and Local and Sports sections full of the same low quality fluff
we're complaining about.

More like 10 pages of news and 20 pages of lighter / fluff content.

------
awwstn
This is smart. Good journalism has never paid for itself (classifieds, paid
subs, ads, etc), and it never will. With most of the old revenue diluted,
anyone who wants to do good journalism needs a way to pay for it, and this
model (invented by BuzzFeed) is a solid effort.

Basically, you drive massive traffic with high-quality, low-brow content, and
sell ads against that content to make enough money to pay for expensive,
important, ongoing journalism.

BuzzFeed started with the viral stuff and moved into journalism, and
Washington Post is doing the reverse. It's particularly good because viral
sites have notoriously low CPMs and shitty ads ("1 weird trick" etc), but when
you build a brand known for credible news and pair it with credible (albeit
low-brow) viral stuff, you can sell ads to better brands at higher rates –
thus increasing your ability to pay for important reporting.

It's the most viable model I've seen in a while for long-term sustainable
journalism businesses.

~~~
petra
But in the end , long term, don't this low-brow content means the brand is
diluted , and than it's a "run to the bottom" between low-brow content makers,
with little left to spend on non-profitable activities?

~~~
snowwrestler
Maybe, maybe not. A print newspaper was filled with a lot of stuff that was
not high-quality news reporting: features, opinions, "local color," comics,
horoscopes, crossword puzzle, sudoku...and of course a lot of ads. Classified
ads, help wanted ads, a "car reporting" section with car ads, a "real estate
reporting" section with real estate ads, a "travel" section with travel ads,
an "entertainment" section with entertainment ads, plus ads next to news
stories, and regular coupon inserts.

A reputation for great reporting really depends on great reporting, not the
proportion of great reporting to the rest of the content. The Watergate
stories--which to a large extent made the reputation of the Post as a top-
notch national newspaper--ran next to a lot of the things I list above.

More recently, the Post was one of the first publications to run stories based
on the Snowden documents, and broke stories about problems at the Secret
Service.

------
acheron
I'm surprised they're just now saying they will look at web traffic as part of
performance reviews. I thought there was a time years ago, pre-Bezos even,
when the Post fired someone basically because they weren't pulling in the web
hits.

I just keep hoping Bezos will interfere more directly with editorial
decisions, because it certainly couldn't be worse. (Famous last words.)
Shortly after he came aboard, the Post dumped Ezra Klein, and brought on
Radley Balko and the Volokh Conspiracy blogs, which were all great signs, but
since then I haven't seen much more in the way of positive developments.

------
blisterpeanuts
I'm a paid subscriber to the digital edition, but I won't be renewing -- had
to actively unsubscribe in advance because last time they sneakily renewed me
sooner than I expected.

WaPo was a great newspaper that today has become rather shallow and partisan
and has lost whatever claim it once held to being the "paper of record" along
with NYTimes and WSJ.

The age of great journalism is over and there's no jobs anymore for hard
charging investigative reporters. Bloggers are trying to assume that role, but
we're still in the shake-out period of hundreds of websites all vying for our
attention (and ad views and monthly fees).

The reader comment sections that accompany almost every article are a joke;
it's almost impossible to have an intelligent, threaded conversation because
the boards appear to be completely unmoderated and are dominated by highly
opinionated trolls and bullies who post one-liner insults and demeaning
rejoinders. Once in a while there's an interesting posting, but it's like
finding a needle in a haystack. The online reader population appears to be
highly partisan, largely Democrats, and some of them come off like full time
DNC employees whose job is to attack the opposition no matter what. A waste of
time.

The editorial page leans left, more so than the New York Times. The news
articles range from near-duplicates of AP/Reuters dispatches to occasional
incisive in-depth reporting from some of the few good journalists still on
staff.

I don't understand why Bezos chose the WaPo, unless it's the beginning of a
publishing empire that he hopes to build. One might have expected him to start
with a more solid publishing organization, but who knows, maybe he'll invest
more money into hiring good journalists and other professional publishing
staff who can bring the paper back up to code. I'm not holding my breath on
that appealing outcome, however, since trends appear to be in the other
direction of clickbait and sensationalism.

------
gadders
I think he needs a new CIO:

“We looked at the problem and I told Jeff I thought we could improve the load
time to maybe two seconds. He wrote back and said, ‘It needs to be
milliseconds,’” said Shailesh Prakash, who heads the Post’s technology team as
chief information officer. “He has become our ultimate beta tester.”

Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by suggesting loading low-resolution images
onto the app first, allowing the page to load on readers’ screens more
quickly.

~~~
Xyik
not sure if this is a joke, think every web engineer knows images are the
first place to optimize.

~~~
gadders
If it is a joke, it's too subtle for me. If you need your CEO to give you
advice like that you're in the wrong job.

------
teh_klev
Archive.is linkage for those, like myself, who are hopelessly incapable of
finding their way around paywalls:

[https://archive.is/4tixC](https://archive.is/4tixC)

~~~
kyberias
"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons"

I'm maybe more hopeless than you.

------
no_wave
No surprise - he won't get to offset its losses to reduce Nash Holdings' tax
bill unless he spends 500 hours a year working there.

It's obviously a net loss if the Post loses money, but I don't think he
intends it to be a loser for long.

~~~
walshemj
Or he's taking a pay out of Murdoch's play book and using the news paper to
push his agenda. Lets hope hes not like Maxwell

------
Kenp77
If I click on the link in HN, it takes me to a "To Read the Full Story,
Subscribe or Sign In", but going from google seems to set a cookie allowing
you to view the full article.

So frustrating.

~~~
roymurdock
Click "Web" under the title of the story, then click the first link.

Agreed that it is annoying to go through that extra step.

~~~
Kenp77
Doesn't work. It worked once, but as soon as I refreshed, or tried it again,
it hides the content. Had to incognito to get the right cookie again. Looks
like they REALLY want more users.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Amazon sends me all these Washington Post newsletters, which I consider a
breach of trust.

~~~
flatline
Last year WP put up a glowing review of Amazon's iPhone resale service on the
front page. This was right before the 6 came out, and I was up for a renewal,
so I figured I'd use them instead of gazelle, which had been excellent in the
past. Long and short of it was that Amazon bilked me out of $100, saying my
phone, which was in excellent condition with only a small ding in one corner,
was in poor condition. There are floods of complaints like this about them
online if I had bothered to research further. Definitely not above board.

------
andreastt
Isn’t it a little bit strange that the paper itself is writing about this, and
presenting it as if it was a serious news story instead of a shameless plug
for itself?

I can accept this for small, local papers, but this seems ludicrous.

~~~
dcole2929
Well the article is by the Wall Street Journal so not sure what you're talking
about

------
asquabventured
To get around the wsj paywall:

1\. Install RefControl plugin for firefox (similar plugins exist for Chrome)

2\. In RefControl options click 'Add Site'

3\. In the new dialog box under 'Site' enter in 'www.wsj.com'

4\. Select the 'Custom' radial button and enter in
'[https://news.google.com'](https://news.google.com')

5\. Click 'OK'.

6\. You can now browse through all WSJ links without the paywall block.

~~~
beachstartup
what is the point of this? if you don't want to pay for the content, it means
you don't value it.

why would you spend time reading something you don't value? it's your own time
you're wasting, not the wsj's.

~~~
verisimilidude
Perhaps some people value this discussion (on HN, for example) far more than
the publication as a whole. So it's worthwhile to jump through a few hoops to
read the article and participate here, but not so worthwhile to maintain a
paid online subscription.

If these publications were smart, they would find ways to capture this kind of
higher quality conversation/participation. But I don't have the answers there.

------
thedogeye
Tripling y/o/y traffic at a large newspaper is impressive. Bezos is a badass.

------
Nayleen
can you post full article? :p

~~~
bryanlarsen
click on the "web" link under the title.

~~~
clebio
[http://imgur.com/vAzlvCT](http://imgur.com/vAzlvCT)

?

~~~
unimpressive
Under the title on HN. There's a bunch of little links, one of them is 'web'.

~~~
forgetsusername
Am I the only one who doesn't see this?

~~~
MechaJDI
You're not..I've never seen a "web link" either.

~~~
bryanlarsen
At the top it says "55 points by Jerry2 13 hours ago | flag | past | web | 60
comments".

------
gchokov
On mobile app load times optimization - "Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by
suggesting loading low-resolution images onto the app first, allowing the page
to load on readers’ screens more quickly." \--- Wow. Much Genius. The more I
read about Bezos today the more I think he has similarities in character with
Trump. Lol.

~~~
drb311
It's the right suggestion. Question is why does Bezos need to suggest it?

Just because it's obvious to us doesn't mean its filtered through to the tech
departments of older, non-tech organizations.

