Despite having overseen a rather tumultuous year at the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has not dropped any hints that he might want to sell the newspaper he bought 11 years ago for $250 million. On Friday, Axios reported that Kara Swisher, the one-time Post reporter who’s built successful media businesses elsewhere, is interested in assembling a bid to buy the paper from the Amazon founder. (Axios’s story followed a similar report by Oliver Darcy earlier this year.)
Asked whether the Washington Post was in fact for sale, a Post spokesperson pointed us to Bezos’s recent live interview in New York where he said, “You know, we saved The Washington Post once” and that “This will be the second time saving it.”
We called Swisher, who moved back to DC a few years ag0—and whose wife, Amanda Katz, recently left the Post, where she worked as an editor in the opinion section—to ask how she thinks she could pull it off.
How real is this bid? Is this something you could put together quickly?
I think so. I’ve just been watching this disaster, and I know all the people really well. I don’t know Will Lewis very well, but I’m not particularly impressed by what he’s done so far. But I began my career at the Washington Post. And I love the newspaper.
But it really was about watching the New York Times and [its CEO] Meredith Levien do the obvious stuff. And Mark Thompson before that. It seemed like nobody at the Post was doing the things necessary to move into the digital future.
The Times has built businesses for games, for shopping, for cooking, for sports.
Right. And, you know, there’s so many interesting media entrepreneurs around that are doing all kinds of cool things. Many of them have been at the Post: Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, myself. And for the first part of Jeff’s ownership, I thought he did a good job. Except for he didn’t. You know, after Trump, they had to do something. They were relying on the Trump bump. The New York Times took advantage of the Trump bump to to change and add things. It’s not just news anymore. You have to have a much more diversified revenue stream.
And this guy [Bezos] is very wealthy. He certainly could invest money. And then everything sort of changed, you know, with this new hire [of publisher Will Lewis], which there were so many great people he could have hired. And then, you know, obviously that that meeting [Lewis] had with staff where he insulted them. He blamed them for the problem.
Let me just say something. I wrote in my book about how slow the Post was to digital. And one of the reasons I left was because I was worried for it. I think the reporters do understand the problem. I don’t think they’re dragging their feet. The reporters are doing a great job. It’s the management that isn’t doing a good job. So that’s made me furious. How dare he do that? How dare he diagnose something and then blame them for failings of his own? And by the way, his entrepreneurial record isn’t so great.
Lewis’s?
There’s dozens of really interesting media entrepreneurs. Jessica Lessin or myself or Jon Kelly from Puck or Mehdi Hasan. Casey Newton. Ben Shapiro, I’ll even give him credit. He’s doing some, you know, not my favorite politics, but boy, has he built an interesting business. There’s all kinds of people doing interesting things, but he’s not one of them. And so for him to sit around and judge these people and then insult, especially women, was just infuriating for me. So I thought, Why did it have to be this way? And, What can you do about it?
It began with kind of an exercise of like, how could you put this together? Which is how I do everything. How would you put together a Washington Post that isn’t bleeding money, that is on much more of a digital trajectory? How would you do that with this amazing brand?
So I just started talking to investors, and I realized I know just as many rich people as anybody. And I know who’s good and who has good intentions. Not that you want to rely on the kindness of rich people. Trust me, you don’t. But I was like, I bet I could put together a group of people here. And as I started talking, a lot of people were like, “If you do this, call me.”
I just would like the paper, if it’s going to be owned by rich people, I’d like it to be owned by rich people who like journalism. I’m not looking at it as, “Let’s make a ton of money here.” Slightly profitable would be great. Break-even would be great.
You must know Bezos, at least in some sense.
Yes.
What sort of argument would you make to him that would make him consider getting rid of it? I know he uses Washington Post plates for some occasions in his house.
I think he has enormous conflicts of interest now. And I think for some reason, I think the first round of the Trump administration, he was sort of hit upside the head by Trump. And it was unfair. I think I defended him several times when Trump tried to push away business from him because he was angry at the Washington Post. What did he call it? Was it the fake Washington Post or—
I think it was the “Amazon Washington Post.”
Yeah. And by the way, Bezos isn’t particularly liberal. I didn’t consider him particularly conservative. I thought he was kind of nonpolitical. Like mostly he just wanted to make money and build businesses, like typical Wall Street people. So anyway, [Trump] was really beating up on Jeff during the first term. And you know, he has aspirations of space through [his space exploration company] Blue Origin. He’s competing with Elon, and he’s got other business interests that he needs help on. So it’s really hard, I think, for him to own the Washington Post and have these business interests he’s more interested in.
If you notice that comment that he wrote to Trump, which was effusive compared to—I don’t begrudge other CEOs having to do that. But his was particularly effusive and forgot to mention he’s the owner of the Washington Post. There is no like, “And by the way, as the owner of the Washington Post, I want to say we’ll be fair.” You know, “We’ll cover you fairly and with accuracy.” He’s got to pick what he wants to be in at some point. Maybe he doesn’t have to because he’s so rich. But it seems to me his business interests really are colliding with the interests of of an independent newspaper.
Do you do you think that the Post could be an attractive business, especially as a break-even proposition, for any rich people? I’ve always wondered if it was weird for Bezos to own a business where success looks so different than it does in tech.
I’m sorry to give people that information, but it’s very hard to be profitable in media. So, I mean, owning an important institution that’s break-even or slightly profitable is a good thing in this environment right now.
The Post lost ten percent of its subscribers after Bezos pulled the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. How do you win those people back?
To me, that essay he wrote—number one, get an editor. And I mean this in the nicest way. I know he doesn’t write for a living, but oh, for fuck’s sake, get a writer, get an editor. I sat there with a pen. I was like, oh, my God. He wrote an essay in which he essentially blamed reporters for the situation without leaving out the fact that Google and Facebook have hollowed out the business model.
The second thing is just the idea, from what I’ve heard from people there, it’s like, “Let’s be centrist.” What does that even mean? That means let’s be nothing. Let’s not have a point of view. Let’s listen to everyone like that idiot over at the LA Times. Let’s have a bias meter.
At some point, a newspaper has to stand for something. I never liked the “Democracy dies in darkness” thing, by the way. Democracy dies in the full light of day.
So what would you do with the Post as its owner?
They did a piece today on Native Americans. What a spectacular piece of reporting that is. They used FOIA and stuff like that. Is there a center to that? No, it just was a great piece of reporting. I would like to find a way so that the really good reporters can do that and then create all kinds of things around them to help support them with revenue streams, whether it’s podcasts, which can be very lucrative, whether it’s events, whether it’s all kinds of things. And also, by the way, cost cutting.
The other part is giving these reporters a stake in their future. I would give everybody a piece of the company. Could you get a number of investors? So it doesn’t pivot on one person, because that’s what it does now.
That sounds a bit like what happened in Philadelphia, where a nonprofit now owns the daily.
So one of the things that I think is interesting, is there another way to do this that it doesn’t rely on the kindness of billionaires, because most of them aren’t that kind. So let them go off and do whatever they want to do. Like build your rockets to the sky. Sounds cool, guys. Good luck. But they’re not interested in this paper. And so I would like owners to be interested in this paper.
Accountability is what this should be about. Accountability of not just conservatives, not just Trump, but everybody. Some fun, some interesting things, like Wordle, some fun, some other things. And you could really create a nice little business. And the last thing I’ll say is I was the retail reporter when retail was collapsing in Washington. It used to be Hechinger’s, Woody’s, Garfinkel’s….
Dart Drug. You covered the Hafts when you were at the Post.
I watched that entire thing happen, and I watched Walmart come in. And Walmart doesn’t advertise. I remember thinking, This paper is fucked. And then when I saw classifieds get decimated by Craigslist, I was like, Oh no, the second stool leg has been knocked out. I understand this is what’s been going on with newspapers for years. So what has to happen is a real shift in this or else it’s just going to be decimated. It’s not going anywhere with the current ownership structure, let’s just say.
Listen, if someone else comes up with a better idea, I hope they can get it. I just think I have a good idea. I think he will not listen to me. But the people I would bring are people who have been successful media entrepreneurs. And by the way, there’s business people there that are dying to do stuff like this.
I don’t begrudge Jeff deciding not to do an endorsement for president. But everyone knows when he should have done it. Every subscriber they lost was his fault. And the point he was making was so that he could curry favor with the Trump administration. That’s what was going on here. If he was interested in improving the paper, he wouldn’t have done that. But Will Lewis is certainly not going to tell him that, is he?
I get the sense Will Lewis would not stick around during a Swisher administration?
No. Let me give him one thing. He’s got a hard job. They’ve got to stanch the flow of capital out of this business. They’ve got to come up with new business plans. They’ve got to cut costs. No question. They’ve got to cut staff. This is just the way it’s going to have to be on the way there. But to treat this group of people like shit while doing it seems to me not the smartest of ways to do it.
So, again, I ask, Jeff, why do you want to own this? And if he has a good answer, except “I just want to own it,” which is not a good answer, I’d like to hear it. So maybe I can take away the pain from him.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
