in the midst of intense speculation to the contrary, Tech billionaire Jeff Bezos last week tried to reassure a nervous newsroom at the Washington Post that he wasn’t trying to sell the August paper.
Rumors, fueled by anxiety over layoffs at the newspaper and, again, speculation, that another billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, is in the market for the title, have been the subject of feverish debate in American media circles. .
The anxiety peaked 10 days ago when Bezos visited the Post and reaffirmed his commitment to journalism, but just four days before the paper announced a wave of headline-wide layoffs.
On the surface, nothing had changed, but the story served to illustrate just how well the recent marriage of wealthy US media and tech moguls to dynastic family ownership has worked.
Now that tech company valuations are falling across the industry, what would be the blow to the media that tech billionaires bought as totems of prestige, influence and public service, and may have imagined they could reshape for a modern medium? by consumer-centric data technology?
Some pundits think the past few years have been a rude awakening for the new US media ruling class.
“I think Bezos came in thinking he understood technology in a way that traditional newspaper people don’t,” said Eli Noam, professor of teleinformation at Columbia University and author of Who Owns the World’s Media? 2015. “He found that technology doesn’t really work to overcome the structural problems of the printing industry. Or if it does, it works for everyone else too.”
Over the past decade, the influx of tech money into the media has been as dramatic as it is surprising. Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013 for $250 million; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar injected the same sum into First Look Media; Laurene Powell Jobs bought a majority stake in Atlantic for a reported $160 million; Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong paid $500 million for the Los Angeles Times; and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought the rights to the “Time” trademark for $190 million.
The trend of tech money to buy media companies, Puck noted last week, led journalists to console themselves with the idea that “mega-successful economic animals would view the product of their labor as a work of art or a family heirloom.”
That calculus is now being challenged as the US news industry wrestles with problems that have plagued it for years: declining print products, struggles to make money online and a host of upstart digital rivals. “Some of the newspaper business has stayed afloat, beyond underpaying its staff, thanks to some form of private generosity and philanthropy. That will continue, but for non-commercial reasons and to amplify your voice,” Noam said.
“This generation of tech billionaires has probably reduced their appetite for print publications, and there is growing skepticism about their ability to change the business in the face of fundamental trends,” he added.
In parallel but reverse trends, “new” media organizations unrelated to legacy print are also under pressure.
Vice Media, which received investment from Disney and 21st Century Fox and was once valued at $5.7 billion, is for sale for less than $1 billion. In December, Buzzfeed, which posted losses recently announced that it was cutting 12% of its estimated 1,522 employees.
Separately, news startup Semafor said last week that it was seeking to return $10 million in funds it received from accused crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, following the lead of Vox Media and ProPublica.
According to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, the overall technology deal market essentially froze in the last three months of 2022 with both deal value and volume down 83% and 57%, respectively. “It’s a broad story of the deal market, not that they’re disengaging from the media,” said Lori Bistis, an expert on technology and media deals at the consultancy. One exception would be Google’s YouTube getting the rights to stream some NFL games next season. “Everyone is waiting to see what happens with interest rates and valuations,” Bistis added.
But the impression that media companies could function like consumer-focused technology companies like Amazon or Google may have been misinformed, said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
“Technology, by its very name, is science. Media companies, at least when we talk about content, are show business, and show business really resists behaving in a predictable way,” he said.
And yet, the value that Bezos can tap into the Washington Post is unmistakable and lies well beyond the newspaper’s profit and loss accounts. And they are the same ones that have always attracted people to media ownership: influence and prestige.
“Washington is rife with Amazon issues and owning the Washington Post gives you soft power,” Noam said. “Everyone knows and understands it.” People always say that Bezos personally owns the Post, but that’s a distinction without a difference.”
For Bezos, as for the other billionaire investors in tech media, Thompson said: “It’s a complex recipe for prestige, ego, the history of the Post, the ways in which it can be leveraged culturally and politically. What matters is how competently technology finds ways to turn it into new media, and that’s a lot harder than it sounds.”
Complex consumer data signatures and real-time analytics tools can strongly influence what stories are written and how news is promoted in many news organizations, echoing the characteristics of addictive gaming and raising questions about the public accountability of the media and the problems of surveillance and managerial discipline. said Caitlin Pietre, author of All the News That’s Fit to Click.
“We saw publishers adapt and, in some cases, bend to adapt to what the platforms demanded. Reach search and optimization for social media has really become embedded in organizational cultures and newsrooms.”
That internalization of technology in media companies has actually had a rebound relationship in some of the technology platforms themselves: another twist in a bewilderingly complex relationship. Layoffs at Meta’s Facebook have included department heads at journalistic dissemination projects.
Still, Thompson believes that even now newspapers can remain unique products despite the growing power of technology and the people who wield it. “Content is the wild card, because no matter how many audience profiles you do, it refuses to reveal its secrets. Robotics might do everything humans can do better at some point, but show business may be one of the last,” she said.
