Bezos' Washington Post execs have a new plan for the opinion section: What if we outsourced it?

It's been clear since near the beginning that Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos never had a particular plan or goal for what would happen after he purchased The Washington Post. It was presumably a vanity play of the sort that American wealth has long fiddled with; even a leading national newspaper is dirt cheap, compared to owning a railroad or conglomerate or starting up your own personal space program. Bezos may have liked the notion of civic responsibility that owning journalists represents, or more to the point liked the idea that other people would like the idea. Again: for a billionaire looking to promote himself to his nation's elites, it's a near-trivial expense.

But Bezos soon fell into the trap that many new corporate heads fall into, when buying a company in an industry that they know feck-all about. They assume that their own assumed genius is transitive across all new desired domains, and so they insert themselves, which typically begets a pattern of holding meetings to announce radical changes, cartwheeling away, and then ignoring all the wreckage from those decisions until yacht life gets boring and it's time for another display of extremely flammable "genius."

The pattern usually also includes stuffing the place with new executives plucked from the bin of world's most toxic and destructive people, but this is usually accidental. People rich enough to purchase prominent companies they know feck-all about are surrounded by toxic blood-stealing suck-ups at all times and in all situations, because those or the sort of people who win the pitched battles to be closest to His Monied Worship's side. So not only does the new wealthy owner have a habit of suddenly lighting large parts of his new business on fire at seemingly random intervals, but the newly installed executives in the biggest offices then spend the majority of their time praising the flames for really brightening up the place.

And then things spiral downhill until either the owning dilettante gets bored or the building's structural supports give way. Sometimes both.

With that introduction, let's have a gander at the latest match to be lit. After a previous Bezos announcement explaining that from now on the Washington Post opinion pages would only be home to opinions that did not personally piss him or the nation's most corrupt-ever "president" off, it didn't take long to get to well what if we just outsourced the whole notion of having opinions, maybe that would work?

Post competitor The New York Times reports on "Ripple," an in-house Post initiative to do just that.

A new initiative aims to sharply expand that lineup, opening The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Executives hope that the program, known internally as Ripple, will appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X.

The project will host and promote the outside opinion columns on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall, according to the people, who would speak only anonymously to discuss a confidential project. It will operate outside the paper’s opinion section.

The Post aims to strike some of the initial partnership deals this summer, two of the people said, and the company recently hired an editor to oversee writing for Ripple. A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.

Oh, there's a whole lot to unpack in that. My goodness.

First, however, we have to start with a caveat. The notion of expanding the journalism-adjacent discourse to include voices that are not in the set of the 100 or so people the nation's producers and editors call on to opine on every happening across the entire world, regardless of expertise—now that's something we could use a lot more of. It is the horrific stifling of every national voice in favor of Generic Insufferable Pundit Slop that is directly responsible for our collapse into fascism.

I'm not even kidding about that one. The reduction of every single issue facing mankind to a "political" debate to be decided among a handful of well-heeled know-nothing wankers, the notion that it's the fecking George Wills and Buckleys and Ross Dou-whatevers who ought to guide the responses to pandemics, to climate changes, to national security threats, to threats to food production—a "fourth estate" made up almost entirely of self-proclaimed omniexperts empowered to reject the collective wisdom of every issue expert in the world because, hey, I work at a newspaper and you don't—that is the toxin that gave permission for politicians to lie, and foment pointless hatreds, and reject reality itself in favor of the grinning Riefenstahlism of Karoline Leavitt.

If you see a pundit on the street, including me, you should push them over. They deserve it. And since the median age in the profession is 152, most of us will break our hips when you do it.

The notion of dislodging this collection of malevolent fops, then: Now that is a good idea. We could get very far if we scraped non-questions like "do vaccines work" completely off the opinion pages and had actual vaccine experts write up the answers instead. It would be a damn fine thing to tell a Bret Stephens sort of hire that unless they wanted to scuttle off and get at least a bachelor's degree in Climate Knowing, they ought to shut their insufferable pieholes and let people who spent 30 years in the field get a word in edgewise.

What if we let the foremost experts in each field debate (or not debate) on the issues most vital to America's survival, rather than pretending the zombified corpse of Newt Gingrich has wisdom that outstrips them all? A revolutionary theory! By God, we might find out that vaccines prevent disease! We might get to the bottom of why entire ice shelves are collapsing, without some professional crank in $800 shoes telling us it's because the ice is angry that gay Americans have too many rights these days! We could prevent the lawmakers of Louisiana from going on a "chemtrail" snipe hunt decades after everyone else realized the ridiculousness of—well, maybe we couldn't.

Baby steps, and all.

But that isn't what The Washington Post is building. It's not even close, in fact, and every line of the Times' reporting (sigh) on the Post's plans (sigh) gives a reason to believe that this whole thing is an elaborate mechanism for the paper to suck more, not less, and in the precise ways that broke America to begin with. Let's re-read:

A new initiative aims to sharply expand that lineup, opening The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America,

Okay, that doesn't sound like elevating non-pundit voices at all. The vast majority of op-ed pages across America rely, presuming they still exist, on syndicated pundits whose columns run in newspapers coast-to-coast and whose expertise also amounts to "[latest news event] proves my prior partisan position, please pay me now." Many of these syndicated columnists appear on television to be treated as experts just as their in-house newspaper and media peers, so this isn't a broadening of editorial voices as it is an outsourcing of them.

The Washington Post has seen a hell of a lot of big editorial-side names ditch the paper in the wake of the Bezos announcement that he'd be policing the opinions they were allowed to have, and the Post's management reaction to these departures seems to be less "well now we have to hire new people to write our content" and more "well what if we don't hire anyone and instead just reprint other people's work."

writers on Substack

Yeah, that's a flag right there. There are quite a few online sources of professional punditry, but there's only one company currently facing user rebellion for policies that are just fine with white supremacist, neo-Nazi and Nazi-Nazi content under the banner of "free speech, I guess." Using the name of that company in describing the sort of writing you're going for is ... conspicuous.

And, again, it suggests the management push is not, in fact, to expand the range of its editorial pages. It's to replace expensive and sometimes too-principled staffers, the ones who are fleeing in proportion to their principle-having, with outsourced versions that can be paid considerably less or, perhaps, not at all.

and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan.

Interesting theory, if by nonprofessional writers we mean voices who have important and non-copy-pasted things to say but also have actual fecking lives and careers that don't involve placing little bows on the tops of whatever turds Washington, D.C.s power classes have last dropped on us. But this sounds suspiciously screw-uppable, so there's got to be a catch that—

A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.

Ah, sweet jeebus, there it is.

Hey, here's a question for the tech-inclined among us. What would you get if you created a custom "A.I. writing coach" to help unsophisticated normie voices write editorial columns, training that "A.I." tutor on what it should be looking for by feeding it all of professional punditry's existing opinion columns and telling it to copy that.

Let's have a guess what those results would look like, hmm?

Yeah. It would be a pink slime of every nonsensical past editorial fetish squirted out of a tube and into your eyeballs. Mmm. Generic.

If we start from the premise that the nation's opinion pages are too awash in hack pundits and could use a bit of issue-by-issue expertise that does not revolve around which aforementioned hacks are being underwritten by which wealthy patrons, then the idea of "what if we, The Washington Post, broaden our horizons to include copies of what other opinion pages are publishing, and what People On Substack are saying, and what ChatGPT comes up with when prompted by a random passerby" seems to be no solution at all.

If we instead presume that this is a media company's attempt to rid itself of the costs and tribulations of actually writing the stuff it wraps advertising around, though, the plan makes perfect sense. Bleeding money, bleeding professionals, and losing credibility every time Jeff Bezos parachutes in with a new "plan," the paper would appear to be following the typical hedge fund plan for media ownership: Cut staff, outsource core functions, and robots, baby.

This plan, in fact, is the opposite of a plan to save either the Post or journalism in general.

At this point, we are all too familiar with investor "turnaround" plans that involve purchasing struggling or middlingly profitable businesses, gutting infrastructure and workforce until only a skeleton crew remains, and relying on the uncanny powers of customer brand loyalty to somehow keep things afloat despite the company's new inability to produce the things that had given the brand value in the first place. We needn't go through it here.

There is no reason to believe that Bezos is engaging in any pattern but the usual one: Parachute in, announce that everyone in his newly discovered industry is stupid except him, stuff the place with yes-men and get increasingly bitter and unpredictable as each new executive plan flops. The pattern typically includes a stubborn misunderstanding of what customers want:

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder and owner of The Post, has been trying to turn around the news organization’s struggling business. He has told confidants that he wants to broaden the publication’s reach beyond its traditional audience of coastal elites.

And somehow always, always reduces to the theory that outsourcing the whole damn core of the business will not just cut costs, but cause new customers to come flocking in.

For years, Mr. Bezos has also urged leaders at The Post to embrace aggregation, the practice of summarizing and linking to journalism published by other outlets, to attract additional readers.

Got it. The mere act of purchasing our product makes our customers elite snobs; we should reject that existing customer base and instead retool the business to appeal to a much greater number of customers who don't buy our product but might if we stopped selling it and instead sold something different.

Buddy, if anyone tries to tell you that such a plan is anything but the hoariest version of executive incompetence, slide up to their ear and whisper just two words: New Coke.

We seem to be in no danger of anyone riding to the rescue of journalism anytime soon; if anything, Bezos and his executive Yes Team are evidence that the monied classes are still obsessed with treating media companies as primarily an extraction industry rather than a productive one. Entertainment executive teams scramble to not produce content and to stop selling existing content so that they won't be burdened with having to pay royalties. Once-dominant online media sites get purchased, stripped of staff, and one by one turn into aggregation sites that collect other company's content, or outsource the content, or crash and burn after turning the content over to random language generating robots that almost immediately turn the company into a new cultural laughingstock.

How any of this is supposed to work out, even a little, remains unclear. How it is supposed to work out for Bezos' team, specifically, is especially confusing; "Ripple" would have to be a resounding success to even scrape back all the subscribers their previous screw-ups have shed.

But this certainly isn't about prying editorial writing out of the hands of aggrieved know-nothings and putting it back in the realm of the honest and factual. The Post isn't partnering with issue experts, or scientific journals, or even threatening to occasionally fact check claims that the know-nothings burble forth.

Nope. They're just outsourcing the existing slop to writers they don't have to cut regular paychecks to. And I imagine the results will be a print version of every pundit panel on every television "news" program backed by every other authoritarianism-agnostic corporate giant: Two sides yelling at other, forever, while editors and producers insist that it's the argument, not the truth, that's the stuff of news.