Abstract
The newspaper industry has been turned upside down throughout the last couple of years. We all know what happened, and still is happening, to the print business: shrinking budgets, layoffs, and readers, as well as advertisers, turning to social media. In the midst of this turmoil, three incredibly wealthy men came along and bought three US newspaper flagships. First, the greeting cards and Boston-based entrepreneur Aaron Kushner went West and bought the Orange County Register in California. Then on the East Coast, the Red Sox owner, John Henry, bought the Boston Globe. And last but not least, Jeff Bezos, currently the richest man in the world and Amazon owner, bought the legendary Washington Post. Dan Kennedy, former media watchdog for the Boston Phoenix now turned journalism professor at Northeastern University, focuses on these three case studies – although in the subtitle only two moguls are mentioned – to analyze whether and how a ‘wealthy civic-minded owner’ might offer a rescue for newspapers in these troubled times.
The first part of the book takes a deep dive into the reasons that caused the selling off of all three newspapers. In the first chapter, Kennedy thoroughly analyzes the disruption that happened to the American newspaper market. Amid layoffs, dwindling newsroom budgets, stumbling media managers and papers going bankrupt, the narrative offers a pretty gloomy, dark atmosphere of an outdated industry. Kennedy perceives the Web as the main cause that brought the decline of newspapers: they could not ask for the same advertising dollars online as in print, although advertising increasingly moved online. But instead of remaining with the online version of the newspapers, advertising revenue moved to the specialized classifieds platforms first, and to social media second. Kennedy points out that the newspapers’ main fault in the crisis was offering their content for free while customers had to pay for the print version. In doing so they cannibalized their own business model that had sustained the production of newspapers for a long time.
In chapters 2 to 9, Kennedy then closely follows the work of the three entrepreneurs and analyzes their strategies as the owners of newspapers with long-standing traditions. Jeff Bezos definitely takes center stage in Kennedy’s book. In Kennedy’s study, Bezos’ activities at the Washington Post since his acquisition are seen as essentially positive. This conclusion is partially grounded on the heavy investments in the Post’s digital infrastructure, integrating it with Amazon. This decision profoundly reflects Bezos’ belief in ‘the bundle’: that is, people like to buy a package that offers many different contents for many different tastes. He concludes Bezos’ vision seems to work, especially with younger readers. In addition, Bezos operates the paper as an active manager and as a swashbuckling fan of journalism and nostalgia. Even if staffing remains low compared to the previous ownership era, the huge investments in digital journalism seem to be paying off in terms of returns.
The second case study involves the purchase of the Boston Globe by Red Sox owner John Henry. Like Bezos, he tried to apply fundamental changes to the newspaper by reducing staff and telling people to pay more, but the new era of the Globe got off to a bumpy start, with a lot of subsequent ups and downs. This might also be due to the fact that, unlike Bezos, Henry never seemed to have an overarching vision about what to do with the newspaper – except for the conviction that people had to pay for news.
Compared to the first two moguls, the third case study can be seen as a cautionary tale. According to Kennedy, Aaron Kushner’s experiment with the Orange County Register is a complete and utter failure. The entrepreneur, who made his fortune with greeting cards among other stuff, attracted several important investors and supporters. But Kennedy explains in great detail how Kushner’s vision to dramatically improve and expand the paper, so ‘the customers would flock to it in such numbers that revenues would quickly offset the cost of creating that improved product’ was foolish, particularly if there was no Plan B.
The book’s main question, whether these new media moguls – although so radically different from predecessors such as Pulitzer, Hearst, or Murdoch – are the true saviors of an industry in decline, remains unanswered. Kennedy declares that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question. Instead, the author quotes Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book Understanding Media that contains the famous but cryptic phrase ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan meant that we should pay attention to the impact on the world and the changes that a medium exerts. Every new media mogul is different in his approach and his impact on a news organization. So in this sense, the mogul is the message.