Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post | Hacker News Reader

Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post

wsj.com

58 pointsJerry264 comments

> The website publishes an average of 1,200 pieces of content a day with increasing amounts geared toward social media. Recent examples include “15 awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015” and a spoof video called “The Galactic Civil War” that tells the story of Star Wars as if it had been directed by documentarian Ken Burns.

> Analytics dashboards will soon be added to reporters’ computers, and traffic figures will eventually be looked at as part of performance reviews, Mr. Baron said.

Having traffic figures as a goalpost in journalist's performance reviews is worrying. Especially when the company is churning out 1200 pieces a day. Sounds like Bezos is pivoting the Washington Post from news to entertainment. Hard to tell the difference these days.

Just to point this out, traffic always drove shaping of journalism. That's exactly how beats are established and budgeted. For example, typical metro desk stories are always popular but not always overly staffed because the news pretty much writes itself. Education takes more work, but it's not that important to audience so you pick a person or two wisely to run it, maybe throw a general assignment reporter on a few stories. Investigative pieces, for those you throw your best people and if it's newsworthy - that is, in the matter of public interest - you wastefully throw resources at it to get the story out. You can't do that for every story though, so editorial meetings are harsh.

The only difference is that for traditional print, the metrics lagged behind by months to a year (these were done by circulation analysts or media analysis companies that do this for a living, with lots of phone calls and even more interpolation). With interpolation, you can imagine how you can under- or overestimate a situation. With print interpolation, it's even worse: they would ask people if they didn't read a newspaper this week, did they at least glance at one that someone held, or left on a bench? If they said yes, they got a checkmark for a partial reach. Based on these delayed and inaccurate numbers, people sometimes got or lost their jobs. More often, they got reassigned to do something else. It's always been like that.

Now, with near-realtime feedback, you better know how a piece or a series or a section front is doing and can react to it in a more timely manner and make adjustments (ex: throw more people on the project, or pull people away from it and have them try something else). For example, ebola as a news topic is not doing so well now because it's pretty much contained, so lets get that reporter onto something else.

Don't assume that this modernization change is going to be a rowship with a whip and a piper. Besos has a decent track record on enabling journalists to do their job better, seen both from the outside and the inside. And yeah, metrics can be misread, misused and misinterpreted, but that's always been a possibility.

> “15 awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015” and a spoof video called “The Galactic Civil War”

I'm not sure you can call this "journalism". Sure, you're giving the people on social media networks what they want: funny, linkbaity stuff they can share. The pageview metrics will support and encourage that. But what individual people want and what society needs is often misaligned, if not diametrically opposed.

I think I'm just disappointed because quality journalism and investigation takes time and is a losing business proposition, so it often requires patrons with large pockets and an altruistic outlook. Bezos could have been that patron. But it seems like he's going in the opposite direction with the Washington Post for business/financial reasons. Not that I should have expected anything else...it is a private company and not a gov-funded org or a charity.

Just for sake of some humor and perspective, compare the clickbaity stories you dislike to a police blotter story from print. One of my favorites from Baltimore is this one, in its entirety:

"Someone entered the rear yard of a house in the 5900 block of Johnson St. on Saturday morning and removed a tomato from a tomato plant. The tomato was valued at $3, police said."

Playing the Devil's Advocate here a little, but Garfield isn't journalism either and we get that in newspapers.

We get 3 pages of comics (my favorite part of the newspaper, especially bizarro, foxtrot, and marmaduke) and 30 pages of news. When you switch the ratios, you're not running a newspaper anymore, you're running an entertainmentpaper. Which is fine, as Rupert Murdoch has proven time and time again.

>and 30 pages of news

That's unfair because those 30 pages of news also include Entertainment / Celebrity and Local and Sports sections full of the same low quality fluff we're complaining about.

More like 10 pages of news and 20 pages of lighter / fluff content.

The "metrics lag" you are describing is a kind of slack that occurs across industries. And, there is always someone who comes in, and often makes their career, by finding a new way to measure that is more precise or closer to real time-- basically they claim, "if this strategy worked for us before then just speeding up the whole process will make it better". But this is often false. That slack in the system is what lazy people use to relax until they make a move or coast into retirement. But its also what smart and productive people use to do things that the system would not have allowed otherwise.

People should stop following particular sources and start following individuals- reporters they can trust to uncover lies, tell the truth, and hit the street looking for a new job when their paper becomes "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal" and "The Washington Post brought to you by Jeff Bezos".

There are good individuals whose names we have to become familiar with, whose careers we should follow, and whose work we should read.

But if you do want to talk about individual sources, there are still good ones out there-- theintercept.com, propublica.org, financial times, smaller guys like www.tampabay.com and civilbeat.com

It's usually leaders in the industry that make good use of metrics, not followers. Reason being is that followers often try to emulate a process they have no working knowledge of, so their measurements and actionables become cosmetic. Case in point, in Baltimore, part of the Compstat system measured health of neighborhoods by counting how many basketball courts had hoop nets. It was a pretty good way to tell what was neglected and where to turn attention to.

Within years, people tasked with making actual improvements started gaming the system and driving around and installing basketball hoop nets in community courts. Let that sink in for a minute.

So yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Even having all the right information in the universe, a person can still make the wrong decisions. You are right about that. If I had all the time to explain my POV, I want to tell you that metrics aren't numbers, they're patterns. Anyone looking at them as numbers is doing it wrong.

The metrics lag is just one problem with measurements I pointed out because there's not enough time and space in the universe to describe them all. I want to say that a higher sampling speed is always better pretty much everywhere, from SCADA systems in the power industry switching to synchrophasors, to news agencies observing metrics patterns on a daily basis, to cameras recording more frames.

Here's why- there are some things you can only tell by observing metrics regularly, meaning daily if not hourly because sometimes it's just passive information. From it we could tell when Libya unplugged from the internet back at the onset of the Arab Spring- that was a big deal. They just went dark instantly, overnight. We could tell when Google+ launched and the Chinese government censors forgot to block ipv6 addresses to it for a few days/weeks and we got unfiltered web traffic from China for a time. We used metrics to make staff shift adjustments because our Asian audiences woke up when our guys went home and the readers didn't want yesterday's news today.

There was a particular lead poisoning story that did very well and got tons of traffic. However, the traffic sources were viral. If you took the time to exclude non-local traffic, the pageviews were pitiful. It meant that the local community took no notice of it and we failed to bring the issue to attention of officials in our own back yard.

Steering my rant toward my original point. The leaders that make good use of metrics might just be Besos and WaPo. Reason being is that while metrics are highly coveted in new media agencies, traditional news agencies have never taken it seriously enough for decision making. To do that, you have to formally tie numbers and methodology to performance evaluation, and that's a huge step. Fighting local print guilds to make that happen is a herculean task.

when examining an organization and what it does -- whether it be a newspaper, a university, or whatever -- it's always worth doing so in light of its charter. The Washington Post is a forprofit entity. Contrast that with, for example, Harper's magazine, which is owned by the nonprofit MacArthur Foundation. I'm surprised that there are any forprofit journalistic entities that haven't completely succumbed at this point (the FT comes to mind) to the pressures/patterns that the WashPost has.

I associate WaPo with clickbait and avoid its articles based on the domain alone. This would tend to explain how it got that way.

Any particular reason for that? They've been an excellent newspaper for decades and I'm personally not noticing a quality decline, so I find your stance baffling.

I only see them via Google News (which I've also cut down on, considerably). The articles are calculated to get maximum viewership. I don't need to read most of them to know what they'll say.

You're confusing The Washington Times with the Washington Post.

I wish that were true.

So the Taylorization of journalism begins. I wonder if Bezos will start monitoring bathroom breaks as well.

https://research.gigaom.com/2013/02/if-amazon-is-the-future-...

> ...temp workers scramble like rats in a maze, pulling boxes off shelves, directed by handheld devices that not only show where the goods are stored but the most efficient path to walk. These devices also monitor each worker’s performance, coaxing them to move faster, move faster, move faster.

This is smart. Good journalism has never paid for itself (classifieds, paid subs, ads, etc), and it never will. With most of the old revenue diluted, anyone who wants to do good journalism needs a way to pay for it, and this model (invented by BuzzFeed) is a solid effort.

Basically, you drive massive traffic with high-quality, low-brow content, and sell ads against that content to make enough money to pay for expensive, important, ongoing journalism.

BuzzFeed started with the viral stuff and moved into journalism, and Washington Post is doing the reverse. It's particularly good because viral sites have notoriously low CPMs and shitty ads ("1 weird trick" etc), but when you build a brand known for credible news and pair it with credible (albeit low-brow) viral stuff, you can sell ads to better brands at higher rates – thus increasing your ability to pay for important reporting.

It's the most viable model I've seen in a while for long-term sustainable journalism businesses.

But in the end , long term, don't this low-brow content means the brand is diluted , and than it's a "run to the bottom" between low-brow content makers, with little left to spend on non-profitable activities?

Maybe, maybe not. A print newspaper was filled with a lot of stuff that was not high-quality news reporting: features, opinions, "local color," comics, horoscopes, crossword puzzle, sudoku...and of course a lot of ads. Classified ads, help wanted ads, a "car reporting" section with car ads, a "real estate reporting" section with real estate ads, a "travel" section with travel ads, an "entertainment" section with entertainment ads, plus ads next to news stories, and regular coupon inserts.

A reputation for great reporting really depends on great reporting, not the proportion of great reporting to the rest of the content. The Watergate stories--which to a large extent made the reputation of the Post as a top-notch national newspaper--ran next to a lot of the things I list above.

More recently, the Post was one of the first publications to run stories based on the Snowden documents, and broke stories about problems at the Secret Service.

I'm surprised they're just now saying they will look at web traffic as part of performance reviews. I thought there was a time years ago, pre-Bezos even, when the Post fired someone basically because they weren't pulling in the web hits.

I just keep hoping Bezos will interfere more directly with editorial decisions, because it certainly couldn't be worse. (Famous last words.) Shortly after he came aboard, the Post dumped Ezra Klein, and brought on Radley Balko and the Volokh Conspiracy blogs, which were all great signs, but since then I haven't seen much more in the way of positive developments.

I'm a paid subscriber to the digital edition, but I won't be renewing -- had to actively unsubscribe in advance because last time they sneakily renewed me sooner than I expected.

WaPo was a great newspaper that today has become rather shallow and partisan and has lost whatever claim it once held to being the "paper of record" along with NYTimes and WSJ.

The age of great journalism is over and there's no jobs anymore for hard charging investigative reporters. Bloggers are trying to assume that role, but we're still in the shake-out period of hundreds of websites all vying for our attention (and ad views and monthly fees).

The reader comment sections that accompany almost every article are a joke; it's almost impossible to have an intelligent, threaded conversation because the boards appear to be completely unmoderated and are dominated by highly opinionated trolls and bullies who post one-liner insults and demeaning rejoinders. Once in a while there's an interesting posting, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack. The online reader population appears to be highly partisan, largely Democrats, and some of them come off like full time DNC employees whose job is to attack the opposition no matter what. A waste of time.

The editorial page leans left, more so than the New York Times. The news articles range from near-duplicates of AP/Reuters dispatches to occasional incisive in-depth reporting from some of the few good journalists still on staff.

I don't understand why Bezos chose the WaPo, unless it's the beginning of a publishing empire that he hopes to build. One might have expected him to start with a more solid publishing organization, but who knows, maybe he'll invest more money into hiring good journalists and other professional publishing staff who can bring the paper back up to code. I'm not holding my breath on that appealing outcome, however, since trends appear to be in the other direction of clickbait and sensationalism.

I think he needs a new CIO:

“We looked at the problem and I told Jeff I thought we could improve the load time to maybe two seconds. He wrote back and said, ‘It needs to be milliseconds,’” said Shailesh Prakash, who heads the Post’s technology team as chief information officer. “He has become our ultimate beta tester.”

Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by suggesting loading low-resolution images onto the app first, allowing the page to load on readers’ screens more quickly.

not sure if this is a joke, think every web engineer knows images are the first place to optimize.

If it is a joke, it's too subtle for me. If you need your CEO to give you advice like that you're in the wrong job.

Unfortunately this is not uncommon part of my job is to audit sites and its shocking in 2015 how poor a job many CTO's/CMO's of many major brands just do not get the internet at all.

Archive.is linkage for those, like myself, who are hopelessly incapable of finding their way around paywalls:

https://archive.is/4tixC

"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons"

I'm maybe more hopeless than you.

No surprise - he won't get to offset its losses to reduce Nash Holdings' tax bill unless he spends 500 hours a year working there.

It's obviously a net loss if the Post loses money, but I don't think he intends it to be a loser for long.

Or he's taking a pay out of Murdoch's play book and using the news paper to push his agenda. Lets hope hes not like Maxwell

If I click on the link in HN, it takes me to a "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In", but going from google seems to set a cookie allowing you to view the full article.

So frustrating.

..and now it's not letting me see it whatever I do.

Click "Web" under the title of the story, then click the first link.

Agreed that it is annoying to go through that extra step.

Doesn't work. It worked once, but as soon as I refreshed, or tried it again, it hides the content. Had to incognito to get the right cookie again. Looks like they REALLY want more users.

Amazon sends me all these Washington Post newsletters, which I consider a breach of trust.

Last year WP put up a glowing review of Amazon's iPhone resale service on the front page. This was right before the 6 came out, and I was up for a renewal, so I figured I'd use them instead of gazelle, which had been excellent in the past. Long and short of it was that Amazon bilked me out of $100, saying my phone, which was in excellent condition with only a small ding in one corner, was in poor condition. There are floods of complaints like this about them online if I had bothered to research further. Definitely not above board.

Isn’t it a little bit strange that the paper itself is writing about this, and presenting it as if it was a serious news story instead of a shameless plug for itself?

I can accept this for small, local papers, but this seems ludicrous.

Well the article is by the Wall Street Journal so not sure what you're talking about

To get around the wsj paywall:

1. Install RefControl plugin for firefox (similar plugins exist for Chrome)

2. In RefControl options click 'Add Site'

3. In the new dialog box under 'Site' enter in 'www.wsj.com'

4. Select the 'Custom' radial button and enter in 'https://news.google.com'

5. Click 'OK'.

6. You can now browse through all WSJ links without the paywall block.

u sir are a genius!

what is the point of this? if you don't want to pay for the content, it means you don't value it.

why would you spend time reading something you don't value? it's your own time you're wasting, not the wsj's.

Perhaps some people value this discussion (on HN, for example) far more than the publication as a whole. So it's worthwhile to jump through a few hoops to read the article and participate here, but not so worthwhile to maintain a paid online subscription.

If these publications were smart, they would find ways to capture this kind of higher quality conversation/participation. But I don't have the answers there.

They may (or may not) be willing to pay in principle, but that principle is untested because they can access the content for free. Value is not equal to the price you pay, but the maximum price you would pay, if you had no other options.

> if you don't want to pay for the content, it means you don't value it.

I don't think these two are related in the way you imply. In fact, I go so far as to say they are related in the opposite way you describe. ex: If you don't want to pay for food then you don't value it? If you don't want to pay for medicine then you don't value it? If you don't want to pay for an education then you don't value it? Many of the things I don't want to pay for I value quite a bit.

Also, I can certainly value the contents of this particular article but not value the contents of the WSJ (in entirety) enough to pay for a subscription.

Finally, and in keeping with the spirit of the comments, I can actively despise that the WSJ has now been taken over by an America Destroying (TM) conservative and be going out of my way to read the article w/o paying.

Anyway, lots of issues with tying value to payments.

There's also a 'web' link on HN below the article title. That will link to a web search for the article, which will allow you to bypass the check.

THANK YOU

Tripling y/o/y traffic at a large newspaper is impressive. Bezos is a badass.

can you post full article? :p

click on the "web" link under the title.

http://imgur.com/vAzlvCT

Under the title on HN. There's a bunch of little links, one of them is 'web'.

Am I the only one who doesn't see this?

You're not..I've never seen a "web link" either.

At the top it says "55 points by Jerry2 13 hours ago | flag | past | web | 60 comments".

google the headline 1:1 and boom

And that's exactly what the "web" link near the top of this page does.

On mobile app load times optimization - "Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by suggesting loading low-resolution images onto the app first, allowing the page to load on readers’ screens more quickly." --- Wow. Much Genius. The more I read about Bezos today the more I think he has similarities in character with Trump. Lol.

It's the right suggestion. Question is why does Bezos need to suggest it?

Just because it's obvious to us doesn't mean its filtered through to the tech departments of older, non-tech organizations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com