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Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post
- Nayleen 11y agocan you post full article? :p
- bryanlarsen 11y agoclick on the "web" link under the title.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- clebio 11y agohttp://imgur.com/vAzlvCT http://imgur.com/vAzlvCT ?
- unimpressive 11y agoUnder the title on HN. There's a bunch of little links, one of them is 'web'.
- forgetsusername 11y agoAm I the only one who doesn't see this?
- MechaJDI 11y agoYou're not..I've never seen a "web link" either.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoAt the top it says "55 points by Jerry2 13 hours ago | flag | past | web | 60 comments".
- marban 11y agogoogle the headline 1:1 and boom
- bryanlarsen 11y agoAnd that's exactly what the "web" link near the top of this page does.
- Kenp77 11y agoIf 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.
- Kenp77 11y ago..and now it's not letting me see it whatever I do.
- roymurdock 11y agoClick "Web" under the title of the story, then click the first link. Agreed that it is annoying to go through that extra step.
- Kenp77 11y agoDoesn'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.
- teh_klev 11y agoArchive.is linkage for those, like myself, who are hopelessly incapable of finding their way around paywalls: https://archive.is/4tixC https://archive.is/4tixC
- kyberias 11y ago"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" I'm maybe more hopeless than you.
- roymurdock 11y ago> 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.
- pp19dd 11y agoJust 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.
- no_wave 11y agoNo 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.
- walshemj 11y agoOr 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
- aszantu 11y agotldr?
- biot 11y agoBezos is taking a hands-on role at The Washington Post.
- Shivetya 11y agoHe is focusing on delivering the best digital experience for the customer while rightly not interfering with the journalistic aspect of the business. One point was his push to improve load times on mobiles by pushing low res pictures first so the article displays faster.
- yannis 11y agoAnd they needed Bezos to figure that one out?
- waspleg 11y agoMy guess is, it's more likely he's a micromanager, but, he also spent $250 million of his own money on it as well.
- DanBC 11y ago> One point was his push to improve load times on mobiles by pushing low res pictures first so the article displays faster. How the fuck do online news sources not know about page load?
- _Codemonkeyism 11y agoAmazon sends me all these Washington Post newsletters, which I consider a breach of trust.
- flatline 11y agoLast 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.
- gchokov 11y agoOn 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.
- drb311 11y agoIt'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.
- gadders 11y agoI 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.
- Xyik 11y agonot sure if this is a joke, think every web engineer knows images are the first place to optimize.
- gadders 11y agoIf 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.
- walshemj 11y agoUnfortunately 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.
- acheron 11y agoI'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.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoI'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.
- asquabventured 11y agoTo 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' https://news.google.com' 5. Click 'OK'. 6. You can now browse through all WSJ links without the paywall block.
- danburgo 11y agou sir are a genius!
- beachstartup 11y agowhat 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.
- verisimilidude 11y agoPerhaps 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.
- mrow84 11y agoThey 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.
- commentzorro 11y ago> 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.
- thedogeye 11y agoTripling y/o/y traffic at a large newspaper is impressive. Bezos is a badass.
- michaelbuddy 11y agobadass at business maybe but WaPo is a sh rag now and probably not getting better any time soon. Liberal slanted crap. I recommend avoiding until they start telling the whole story on topics and actually putting some levelheadedness behind their opinion columns, not sjws calling everyone immoral.
- awwstn 11y agoThis 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.
- petra 11y agoBut 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?
- snowwrestler 11y agoMaybe, 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.
- andreastt 11y agoIsn’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.
- dcole2929 11y agoWell the article is by the Wall Street Journal so not sure what you're talking about