Bezos is right about news profits

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 “more mature” in his second term than his first and that Amazon’s commission of the Melania documentary was in no way whatsoever an attempt at “buying influence”.

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.

But anyway, he said something else in the interview with which I do agree – and whose importance was only underlined by another announcement this week.

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’t just run the Post as a trust, he said: “The Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. Let me tell you why. Because it’s a measure of its relevance. If people won’t pay for our product, it’s not a good enough product.”

Yes, yes, and thrice yes. More than an owner’s 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.

You might think Bezos is going about producing that kind of journalism at the Post in an odd way, but he’s right to point out to America’s 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 “fourth estate” and so everything they do is valuable in that it is holding the government to account or “speaking truth to power”. I’m afraid that I agree with Bezos when he says that actually it is profits that are the “signal that we are providing a relevant service”.

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.

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, “nostalgia is not a business model”.

I don’t 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.

What does this mean in practice? At its simplest, it’s about recognising who your readers are and what they want from you. Take a look at any publishers’ data and you’ll 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.

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here