I’m in London this week for the first TRB Media Mixer, an invite-only get-together for media people we are holding on Thursday in collaboration with Beehiiv. Looking forward to seeing British friends and being asked incredulously about American politics. We have a couple spots open; hit reply if you’re local and would like to drop by. We will also be holding a NYC version of the Media Mixer next month.
The Washington Post is clearing the decks again. CEO Will Lewis is out after gutting the company. The question now is what Jeff Bezos will look for in the critical choice for who to lead the Post.
Much of that will hinge on what identity Bezos wants the Post to have. His one statement about the massive cuts so far has been an anodyne line about listening to customer data. That ignited flashbacks to disasters of the scale era, when dashboards replaced judgment. Bezos is a classic internet scale guy when media is moving in the opposite direction.
Bezos now has 13 years running the Post. He surely knows the limits of blinding following the data. It doesn’t line up neatly with his political repositioning of the Post either: 250,000 customers told him clearly they didn’t like his tanking of the Post’s the Kamala Harris endorsement.
In the latest episode of The Rebooting Show, Omeda CEO James Capo and I spoke about the concept of the connection economy as a replacement for the attention economy.
“We have been dialing and turning the dials in so many different ways to get that 1-2% more,” James told me. “What we’ve lost sight of is that the best media companies are connecting with their audiences in multiple ways, building a relationship with them, and building that lifetime value.”
We dig into the idea of a connection economy, where audience relationships are the core asset. We also get into why so many publishers struggle to operationalize audience-first strategies, how B2B and consumer media models are converging, and where AI fits if it’s meant to add real utility rather than repeat past mistakes.
Thanks to Omeda for supporting The Rebooting. See its latest newsletter engagement playbook to learn which metrics leading media teams use to define real engagement, why up to 63% of your clicks might be fake and how to fix it, personalization tactics that boost retention without adding hours to your workflow, and much more.
Bezos’ choice
Will Lewis ended what was by any measure a disastrous tenure as CEO, leaving behind a husk of an organization.
Interim CEO Jeff D’Onofrio was a safe near-term option. Jeff Bezos must now decide on a new CEO. But he must first decide on an identity. Does he still aspire to the Post being a centrist national news publication? Does he want a disruptive product guru? A sales leader to stop the bleeding? Below are the archetypes of news media CEO.
The Visionary Journalist. This is the unicorn. Journalists by rule are not meant to be managers. The Platonic ideal of a media CEO is someone who has a vision for the journalistic mission combined with the business acumen that recognizes tradeoffs are a necessity.
The Atlantic has thrived under Nick Thompson, for instance. Nick’s a rare case of someone who has reporting and writing chops, entrepreneurial experience in launching a startup and business credentials running a successful subscriptions business at The New Yorker. Others who fit the mold: Nick Denton, The Information’s Jessica Lessin, The San Francisco Standard’s Kevin Delaney, Puck’s Jon Kelly and Axios’s Jim VandeHei.
Naturally, I am biased toward this archetype. It avoids the situation of having a cavalry captain who cannot ride a horse. Newsrooms are difficult to lead. It helps to have someone who is part of “the guild.”
The Sales Leader. A popular choice at magazine companies is the sales leader. This serves to make clear the journalistic mission is in service of a business. And in ad-driven business models, client relationships are paramount. This is the direction Marc Benioff went with Time by bringing in Jess Sibley. Forbes has a similar approach with Sherry Phillips. Semafor’s Justin Smith is in this mold, as is The Financial Times’ Jon Slade. Future’s recent CEO turned banker, Jon Steinberg, is cut from this cloth.
The downside, of course, is the sales leader who does not have an innate feel for the product, which in news organizations is the journalism. This isn’t impossible. Look at The New York Times, which has thrived under the leadership of Meredith Levien, who rose through the sales ranks at The Atlantic and Forbes before coming to the Times in 2013 as an ad exec.
A bold move: Buy Semafor, tack back to an elite audience strategy that has lots of great parties.
The PE Mercenary. The reality of the media industry is many brands will enter into the private-equity phase of their existence, when assets need to be optimized and nostalgia is a possibly fatal liability. The PE mercenary starts with the numbers and ends with the numbers. The risk is flushing the brand value in the process.
G/O Media’s Jim Spanfeller fit this bill with Great Hill Partners as “sponsor.” Bending Spoons brings this to the table. Many newspaper chains have gone down this path. This would be an admission of defeat with mandate to manage decline.
The steady CFO. The quiet power center at companies is the CFO. Rarely front and center, often generalists, CFOs are safe options. It’s no surprise that Jeff Bezos turned to Jeff D’Onofrio to take the interim CEO role to stop the bleeding. Editor-in-chief Matt Murray can keep the newsroom together through the crisis while D’Onofrio can make the numbers work. Bezos is clearly sick of losing tens of millions on the Post.
There are success cases with this approach. Bloomberg Media returned a good year under Karen Saltser, who rose to the CEO job from the CFO role. Sometimes it does not work, as was the case with Fortune, where Anastasia Nyrkovskaya lasted less than two years in the top role.
The Media Veteran. Like the NFL, the media industry can recycle the same candidates. The upside is these candidates easily slot into the role and can capably do the job. Bezos went down this path already, hiring former Politico CEO Fred Ryan as CEO prior to Lewis. Following the disastrous Chris Licht experience, Warner Bros Discovery turned to a media veteran in Mark Thompson, who held the top role at The New York Times and BBC. The Philadelphia Inquirer turned to former New Yorker publisher Lisa Hughes, who has gotten the paper to profitability.
This is a safe choice, but the moment in the media business arguably calls for new energy since the old playbooks are frayed. Few notable media veterans have outstanding track records since the entire field has compressed. One out-of-the-box exception: Industry Dive CEO Sean Griffey, who built a highly profitable niche B2B business to a $525 million exit. Bonus: he already lives in the Washington area.
The Tech Outsider. Every industry has tech envy and the acute realization that they sit downstream of tech. Condé Nast replaced media veteran Bob Sauerberg with Roger Lynch, who was president of Pandora and earlier served as CEO of Sling TV. Puck brought in Sarah Personette as CEO, following her executive roles at Twitter and Facebook. The Minnesota Star Tribune’s billionaire owner hired former Google exec Steve Grove.
In an earlier era, AOL took this approach at The Huffington Post by naming former Spotify executive Jared Grusd as CEO. I sat next to Jared at a dinner not long after and asked him about whether his thin media business experience made for a learning curve. I recall he shrugged and said the dynamics aren’t that different.
While true, news businesses are peculiar. Semafor’s Ben Smith made the point to me that journalists see themselves as working for the guild of journalism as much as a specific company. The unrest in newsrooms as the industry shrinks makes a tough job even tougher. At The New York Times, the editor doesn’t even report to the CEO. Talk about a strange way to run a business.
The Product Guru. This is a vanishing breed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti embodied the archetype, as a hacker who understood modern distribution systems. Upworthy’s Eli Pariser was an academic turned media CEO. Quartz went down this path with Zach Seward. Sherwood CEO Josh Topolsky fits this bill.
This model is mostly dead as these businesses are not going to win on packaging and finding distribution themes. This is hardly a time for Rick Rubins, sad to say. The argument in favor would be a conviction that AI will bring upheaval to the news business even greater than the transition from analog to digital.
On the latest People vs Algorithms, Alex and I discussed the convulsions at The Washington Post, whether reputation matters anymore and Anthropic’s misleading Super Bowl ad.
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