The billionaire publishers who are moving your way

Jun 18, 2018 at 09:26 pm by Staff


Evolving technology and his revival of the Washington Post is earning Jeff Bezos "hero" status, even among the newsmedia industry.

It's probably too late now, but it prompts the thought that Mark Zuckerberg and the Page-Brin-Schmidt trio that owns Google should have bought themselves a newspaper.

The teaming of Amazon (and its cash), and now its Alexa technology and the Post's growing international presence a new office in Hong Kong, existing ones in Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi and Islamabad, and those proposed for Rome and Mexico, mean the tech, e-commerce - and possibly publishing interests of the world's first 100x billionaire - are coming your way.

Beat him or join him (and we don't rate your chances of the former), there are lessons to be learned on avenues for expansion.

Video is one, where the Post is building capability comparable with a dedicated TV station in a bid to avoid the need for website users to turn elsewhere for vision of an event it's reporting.

As we go to press, the fairytale wedding of the American girl from the wrong side of the tracks to the rich and handsome prince is a talking point. Midway through watching live coverage, I switched to YouTube to see that a third of a million people were tuned to the Washington Post's channel, possibly second only to that of the 'Royal Family' - since when were they a publisher? - and substantially more than Australia's second state broadcaster, SBS scored free-to-air.

Senior editor and director of editorial video Micah Gelman talked recently of the "pivot to video" which has seen its video team more than double to 70 since he came on board three years ago, and output on washingtonpost.com, apps and platforms pushed up to 175-200 live events a month.

Content also goes out on Kindle Fire, Snapchat, Twitch, AppleTV, Roku, YouTube and Facebook, with editors on quick-turn content, reporters in the field around the world and graphics animators. Most are embedded "across the newsroom", so that politics or financial video reporters sit with their respective teams. A dozen video journalists are also doing breaking news, a relatively recent development Gelman says is now expected of them, along with a commitment to "be true to ourselves".

Some of the cultural change which has accompanied this was outlined by Gelman in an address to Vizrt users. While most content is unhosted, the Post has invested in on-camera talent such as film maker Nicole Ellis from CNN doing "inspired life stories", tecchie Hannah Jewell from Buzzfeed UK on pop culture and the internet, former Top Chef contestant Mary Beth Albright talking about food.

The Post even has a satirical team: Gelman says other platforms were having "way too much fun" with news and they didn't want to miss out. And fun they've been having, from the presidential election and what has followed, weather events, migration, coffee demand or Willie Nelson singing the paper's 'democracy dies in darkness' slogan.

He says 360 video is a storytelling medium which "continues to excite us", along with AR, but they are wary of tech gimmicks. "If it doesn't feel as if it's adding to the story, it's a bit of a distraction." And hardware credibility has come with broadcast-format Sony FS5 cameras to replace DSLRs for video journalists - "it's a bit hard to walk up to a satellite truck in a breaking news situation with a DSLR," Gelman says - while interested staff photographers have been given mirrorless A7s. LiveU backpacks and drones are also part of obligatory equipment. Premiere for basic editing heads a list of Adobe products, with Vizrt for live storytelling and Polygon Labs for integration with AP data.



Elsewhere, the Post is sharing at least some of the benefits of extensive inhouse technological development with the newsmedia industry, most recently in a cooperation with the non-profit Lenfest Institute for Journalism which is contributing to the cost of an implementation of the Post's Arc Publishing software at its Philadelphia Media Network.

The Arc software unit will share new digital tools with newsrooms in the Knight-Lenfest newsroom initiative. Lenfest - which has a mission to "develop and support sustainable business models for great local journalism" - takes its name from cable TV entrepreneur Gerry Lenfest, who established the institute in 2016, giving it a start of $20 million plus the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News newspapers and philly.com website.

The Arc offering - including the Goldfish CMS and goodies such as Bandido for A/B testing mentioned by Gelman - is an ever-expanding one, spruiked at conferences including those in Berlin and Singapore by director Matt Monahan and chief information officer Shailesh Prakash. Notable is an audience-targetting tool called Clavis, a Bezos initiative named Virality which tries to predict which stories will go viral, and the Heliograf 'storytelling agent' first used at the London Olympics. It's in their nature too, that Post also has a bot which crawls competitor sites and rates how riveting their content is (see GXpress November 2017).



Much of which Amazon already has (Bezos owns the Post privately), and in the US you become aware that this is much more than an e-commerce business, but one in which publishing - even with plugs and links on third-party partner sites - plays a part.

Dropping into Seattle, as I did on my way home from America East conference in Hershey, the Amazon factor is everywhere. It seemed everyone I spoke to on the flight had a family member who had an interview with Amazon, or was hoping to get one.

Forget that we, the media, are paying it way too much attention - and too much free publicity - at least if you listened to Siteworks president Mike Egelanian's claim that Amazon's share of retail was only 0.74-1.25 per cent. Nearer the reality perhaps, were the problems being experienced by major advertisers, there as elsewhere, as a result of money being sucked out of the market.

Whether Bezos' presence in the market will ultimately be positive for newsmedia companies will depend on the lessons they learn from him, about customer-centricity, for a start.

Just as retail is not just about prices or delivery - although these pieces of the puzzle must be in place - but about the relationship a retailer has with its customers. As part of "reducing friction", they're looking at the "unbanked bank", a concept which would deliver consumption and product search data, pricing preferences and direct knowledge of your financial assets... an uneasy relationship.

Big data is a commodity newsmedia, like local retailing groups have generally been slow to capitalise on. Even now, print publishers know relatively little about their readers, although initiatives in the UK by The Sun and the Daily Mail - which are currently buying readers' data through 'loyalty club' promotions which offer cash for proofs of purchase - and of course, Germany's Bild are a start.



In a video shown to Vizrt users, he tells how the Post has changed, with "a little more swashbuckling, a little more swagger, a tiny bit of badassness, that is pretty special... and the quality journalism that is at the heart of everything."

It's an uplifting aspect of what has become a newsmedia and technology company, its success underpinned by digital expertise and data.

Yet perhaps unlike Facebook and Google (and everything is relative here), Amazon is the competitor you could grow to love. Apart from the hero status accorded him by the Springfield Republican's George Arwady at America East in Hershey, it's not hard to make allowances for someone who - apart from "reviving" the Washington Post - appears to be taking a keen interest in the rebuilding, even reincarnation, of what is still basically a newsmedia business.

But is he friend or frenemy?

Will the combination of the expanding international Post newsroom, Alexa and her Echo home assistant platform, add up to the Washington Post becoming a global competitor? Only time will tell.

Peter Coleman

• This article first appeared in GXpress Magazine May/June 2018

Pictured: The iconic Pike Place Market sign in Seattle, the city in which Bezos and Amazon are headquartered and (right) Jeff Bezos (during a US Department of Defence visit, public domain photo by Adrian Cadiz)

Sections: Newsmedia industry

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