Jeff Bezos: Meet the new boss.
Every blogger loves Jeff Bezos, because collecting commissions on sales through Amazon Associates ads — hurry now and save! free shipping on purchases over $25! — is one of the best revenue opportunities for anyone with a Web site. Instapundit regularly advertises the latest Amazon deals and, while my own efforts in that direction are more sporadic, it’s enough Amazon sends me a check every month.
So yesterday the big news was that Bezos paid $250 million to buy the Washington Post, and on the same day my monthly Amazon check arrived and it occurred to me that this was a perfect example of how bloggers were ahead of the Old Media curve. When I jumped out of the newspaper business and into the blogosphere in 2008, the basic idea was to eliminate the middleman — instead of being a mere employee of a publisher, instead I’d be vending my work directly to the consumer as a journalistic entrepreneur.
Employees of the Washington Post are now my colleagues, and the colleagues of every other blogger who collects Amazon revenue. Thus the democratizing effects of New Media further erode the distance between the categories of “journalist” and “dude with a Web site.” Now you have a lot of journalists trying to explain it:
What is Jeff Bezos thinking?
— John Harris, Politico
Can Bezos Save the Washington Post
From Print’s Dismal Economics?
— Megan McArdle, Bloomberg
Here’s Why I Think Jeff Bezos
Bought The Washington Post
— Henry Blodget, Business Insider
Big hint: The explanations offered by journalists are no longer privileged over the explanations offered by Dude With a Web Site.
The journalistic means of production (to borrow from Marxist rhetoric) are now within reach of anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection, and the institutional authority wielded by professional journalists is therefore steadily eroded, for good or ill.
Having spent the first 22 years of my career in the print newspaper industry, I have an abiding affection for the printed word, and a respect for the vital role that a good newspaper can play in the life of a community. But the clueless dinosaurs who own America’s newspapers, who have mismanaged those institutions and sabotaged both their credibility and their profitability . . .
Well, f–k ’em all, and also f–k their arrogant lazy employees who expect to be paid full-time salaries and benefits for punching the clock 9-to-5 and producing maybe 2,000 words a week.
Online competition for readers requires professional journalists to show some hustle out there, as our football coaches used to say. You’ve got to give it 110% every day or risk being beaten out by a more determined competitor. The advantages of employment by a prestigious institution like the Washington Post cannot save the career of any reporter who lets himself get scooped by Bretbart.com or BuzzFeed or even, as in one notable recent example, TheDirty.com.
A winnowing process has been under way for more than a decade. Headlines about wave after wave of layoffs at newspapers struck pain in my heart, as it must for everyone who learned their craft in the Old School, but there’s something I noticed: Almost none of these laid-off newspaper staffers ever show up as bloggers or as online freelancers.
Once they lost their jobs — the regular paycheck and the institutional authority of the organizations that formerly employed them — their commitment to journalism seems to have evaporated. They didn’t really have the hunger, the driving desire necessary to keep hustling every day once they lost that career prestige, and so the idea of striking out on their own never seems to have crossed their minds.
F–k ’em. F–k ’em all.
Shop now for big savings at Amazon!
By God, I ain’t afraid to hustle for a dollar, and I ain’t ashamed, either.