- The beleaguered Washington Post has a new plan: launch a new news site.
- This seems like the polar opposite of the existing Post: a focused social media platform aimed at a broad audience.
- That will be difficult to achieve, especially if the post is also running an older post at the same time.
The Washington Post is in trouble: It's running out of money, its readership is falling, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, is seeking a new plan.
The plan is… to create a new version of BuzzFeed?
This was apparently announced in separate words by executives at the paper. The announcement, made by CEO and Publisher Will Lewis, can be found below:
I'm excited to announce that later this year we'll be launching a new division of our newsroom dedicated to better serving readers who want to consume and pay for news in ways other than traditional news. This third newsroom will consist of service and social media journalism and will operate separately from our core news operations. Its goal is to provide the millions of Americans who feel traditional news isn't for them, but who still want to stay informed, with engaging, inspiring and accurate news, where they want it, in the style they want it.
That doesn't tell us much, and a Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment further. And some fundamental questions remain. (For example, what exactly is “social media journalism”? Making TikToks? Writing about TikToks? Making TikToks about TikToks? All of the above?)
Still, it's clear that Lewis, who was appointed by Bezos last fall, has looked at The Post's existing business strategy — running a newspaper with national ambitions and a subscription-based revenue model — and concluded that it doesn't work, so the new, as yet unnamed, thing will be something different.
It's possible that some sort of subscription will be part of the new thing — note Lewis' use of the word “paid.”[ing] The Post says it will “drive reader interest in news in other ways,” but its goal seems more like it wants to leverage social media platforms to create news and news-related content that will reach a much larger audience than The Post currently does, and then monetize that attention with advertising.
And if that sounds familiar, it's because that's what happened often the last time around in digital media, when companies like BuzzFeed and Vice (and the site you're reading right now, Business Insider) joined Facebook and its rapid growth trajectory. The problem was, when Facebook's goals differed from the publishers' goals, publishers got left by the wayside.
That's not to say running a large, mostly free, ad-based digital media company is a guarantee of failure; you might still be able to succeed, especially if you can keep costs low. (Lewis's memo also mentions “leveraging AI,” but it's worth noting that when asked about headcount plans at Monday's all-hands meeting, he said nothing, according to employees who listened in on the meeting.) The UK's Daily Mail, for example, has built a very big business on free, clickable headlines.
It's also natural that a new manager would come into the workplace, decide that the old ways aren't working, and want to dramatically change course. And just because many publishers are relying more and more on subscriptions rather than social media doesn't mean that's the case.
The more worrying part about Lewis' plan is that he two The plan: The Washington Post will probably continue to function like the old Washington Post, and there will be a new, unnamed Washington Post that will operate quite differently.
Lewis could hope for some synergy between the two businesses (for example, the existing ad sales team will convince themselves that the new business will help them reach a different audience), but it's unlikely he'll get there. If it works, it will be because he's figured out how to run two newsrooms with two different goals in an environment that tests the patience of even the richest man in the world. Good luck.
