Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” now a regular Contrarian Boston feature. Today, we dive into billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ push to boost productivity at the struggling paper. Borrowing a page from his Amazon empire, Bezos wants the Post to double the number of stories it churns out, even as it grapples with layoffs that have sent hundreds of reporters and editors packing. However, in a small bright spot, the Post has bucked the Trump administration’s calls that it stop running an anonymous tip line aimed at Department of Defense workers.
Emily Rooney was joined by Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, The Boston Globe’s Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of Globe Rhode Island and Globe New Hampshire, and Scott Van Voorhis, editor and founder of Contrarian Boston.
And thanks to Tonia Magras, principal owner of Hull Bay Productions, who produced today’s piece. Tonia was the supervising producer for “Beat the Press” when it was on GBH and is the principal owner of Hull Bay Productions.
If you would rather use a different platform, you can also watch “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” on Contrarian Boston’s YouTube channel.
Edited transcript:
Emily Rooney: All right, moving on. As we’ve been reporting here the past couple of months, the Washington Post has undergone a sea change, cutting its reporting staff in half, eliminating sports and virtually all of its international coverage and limiting its opinion pages to what Jeff Bezos refers to as personal liberties and free markets. The changes have cost them hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers, untold numbers of home deliveries. But as Dan reported recently, the Post is clinging to its right to report on the Pentagon despite the lack of press credentials due to unreasonable demands from the Trump administration.
Dan, explain that. How does the Post’s (Pentagon) tip line work and how come Jeff Bezos hasn’t shut it down?
Dan Kennedy: Well, first of all, the Post has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers going back a couple of years to when they canceled an endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute. The 60,000 was just a reaction to the most recent cuts. You know, a lot of news organizations have posted anonymous tip lines. On their websites, and it’s a way of protecting their sources. The problem, of course, is that you don’t even know who the tip is coming from, so the journalists have an extra layer of verification they have to do to make sure that what they’re getting is authentic. But The Post has kept up a tip line that they run with their defense stories. Saying that if there are any Pentagon employees or service members who would like to tip us off to wrongdoing, just click here. And, um, in, in the course of the New York Times, in the course of pursuing its own lawsuit, discovered that the administration was objecting to this tip line and is trying to get the Post to either modify it or shut it down entirely. And the Post has just said, no, we’re going to continue to do this.
[01:18:43.03]
This is an important part of our mission. And I think it’s important to note that even though Bezos has done terrible damage to the Post, and even though the opinion pages have become something of a joke, the newsroom under editor Matt Murray has continued to do a good job. And I think this is an indication of that.
Emily Rooney:
You know, Scott, yesterday’s or the weekend’s New York Times had a really interesting piece saying that Matt Murray tried to resign. Will Lewis was the executive editor. He did resign. But when all this was going down with Bezos, Matt Murray wanted to resign and Bezos convinced him to stay. And there was a lot of interesting stuff in that report that, you know, Bezos says that that the productivity at the paper had dropped by double. And, you know, who knows whether that was a morale issue or whatever it was, or whether reporters had become lazy. But he said, we’re going to cut the staff in half and we’re going to become more productive. I mean, that’s kind of an old saw in the newsroom, but I mean, he might have been right about that. I mean, it’s possible that, you know, people weren’t as productive as they once were.
[01:19:51.12]
Scott Van Voorhis:
Yeah, he had— I mean, one of Bezos’s gripes, I guess, from that article, reading that Times article, was that they’re not using, statistics enough or data enough in making their decisions. And that he had data showing that the articles per reporter had dropped by 36 percent since 2020, and that page views had declined by 48 percent. So it’s an interesting statistic. Um, and I also wonder whether, given how much turmoil there’s been at the paper that this also reflects morale or people leaving. So he may be on to something. I also wonder whether that’s not the most, you know, if (Bezos) is missing the human angle of the whole thing too. I mean, I think you do get a tendency - on part of reporters - you love to spend time on a good story. So that’s why you have editors, right? Or editors or, you know, shepherd things along. However, that’s a long-standing kind of, um, so it’s a faux solution to a declining news organization. I’ve been at a couple of them myself, where you are told everybody’s got to work harder, we all have to do, you know, double the amount of stories, that’s how we’re going to do it.
[01:21:06.21] - Speaker 5
And while you are busy doubling your story count, you’re losing, you know, you’re losing sight of the big picture … and your ability to report on things that people are interested in or actually dig in and make a difference on a story. But it’s interesting. I mean, he (Bezos) managed to convince Murray to stay on by showing that I am interested, I do want, I’m committed to the Post in his, you know, in this kind of clinical way of saying it. And that’s important. He seems like he’s a decent editor. But, you know, they have to— things have to settle down. People have to believe that the Post is going someplace and not just be subjected to constant turmoil. I would think then that maybe they’ll do more articles, I don’t know, or better articles.
Emily Rooney: Well, they did agree to keep the investigative unit. You know, Lylah, it got me curious about whether The Globe does similar measurements. I mean, I got this thing at the end of the year where it said it told me who I read the most, what kind of articles I read the most. I was actually really fascinated to see, you know, somebody analyze what I do. But I mean, you guys judged by productivity? I mean, with AI and all this stuff, everybody can keep track of this so they know. But is that really a measure of quality? Is it a measure of, you know?
[01:22:24.17]
Lylah Alphonse: To be completely transparent, there is not a single news operation in this country that does not use metrics. Not a single one. Everyone is tracking how much productivity you have in terms of the number of articles, in terms of the amount of traffic, in terms of the amount of click-through from various other entry points, newsletters, social media, the homepage versus finding something in search, click-throughs from Google, from back in the day used to check click-throughs through Yahoo and Bing too. Now it’s not a big thing. So there is no organization that is still operating that does not use metrics in some way to measure how they’re doing, both on the company level but also at the individual level. That said, I think there’s a danger in what Bezos had mentioned about we need to cut the newsroom in half and double productivity because it sounds like they’re only measuring volume.
And it takes a lot longer to do an investigative story than it does to rewrite three things from the police blotter. And so if you’re just looking at the sheer number of bylines rather than what each person is actually covering, I think you end up with a problem that you see at the Post now where they’re rerunning things from 3 or 4 years ago in the paper because … the people they’ve let go are the ones who are doing some of their most in-depth stories, which brings me back to the tip line.
[01:23:50.10] - Speaker 3
It’s easy to keep a tip line open. We don’t know what’s coming in. We don’t know who’s monitoring it. They let go of their federal watchdog reporter. So they can keep this tip line open to needle the Trump administration because the Trump administration doesn’t want one, if they close it, the reporters will just put up their signal handles and people will reach them that way. We all do that too. Everyone, or many reporters, especially investigative reporters, especially crime reporters, have their own tip lines in the bottom of their social media or their email sig where you can send them information anonymously. So I don’t give them kudos for keeping open their tip line. I have kept mine open. It all depends on who’s monitoring it, who’s vetting it, and who’s writing up things from it and whether they’re getting scoops from it. And I think time will still tell.
[01:24:48.00]
Dan Kennedy: You know, one other thing about the productivity, I kept waiting for somebody who was reporting on this declining productivity to point out that sort of during the height of the Post’s success some years ago when Marty Baron was editor, in addition to doing great journalism, they were publishing massive amounts of clickbait, the sort of thing that would just take a couple of minutes to bang something out and put up. And that was bringing in a lot of eyeballs, and that would make people look very productive, wouldn’t it?
[01:25:26.01] - Speaker 3
Lylah Alphonse: Back in, back when Huffington Post was, was the big thing, that, that was an actual strategy. It was called business in the front, party in the back. You would have the big stories, the big important stories, and then you’d have stories that never made it to the homepage of the site that were based entirely on search queries like, can I break my finger if I do this? And that would be the headline and replace another word for finger and you have a second story. And it would be stuff that people were randomly searching for, non-Huffington Post readers, and it would turn up in search and they’d get some percentage of click-throughs, and it made their traffic numbers soar. The hang time though, theamount of time people were spending on the articles, a couple seconds. Literally didn’t matter. But the click-through rate and the traffic rate got larger.
