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The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferrable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

But last week’s flaming self-immolation – when the Post staff was cut by a third, including 300 newsroom journalists, its sports and book sections were tossed overboard (this, from the world’s pre-eminent bookseller), and its foreign coverage was gutted – revealed the stark truth that Bezos doesn’t understand how to run a news organisation any more than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein could figure out how to deliver dog kibble to your door by drone. His statement last week doubled down on his enduring misapprehension. ‘Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,’ he proclaimed. ‘The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.’ No, it’s not the data that tells us, Jeff. It’s the intellect and enterprise of journalists searching out stories that readers didn’t know and editors who push them to do so. It’s beating the competition with scoops that make readers stop what they are doing and start firing up their text chains. It’s excavating the way we live today with pre-emptive insights that readers have only just begun to identify themselves. Daniel Keel, founder of a successful international book publishing house, once said about the fight against deadening data enslavement: ‘Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.’

Why did he allow Lewis to fail for so long? One can’t imagine him........

© The Spectator