NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.

What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).

For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.

Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.

Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.

Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?

This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.

> It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.

Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?

> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.

This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.

Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.

'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.

So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro

The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!

> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.

That’s it.

What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.

Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"

A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.

But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.

I can’t think of a better policy suggestion for folks who have more than $100mm than this. Sort of like “corporate death penalty” mostly serves to distract from fines, “no more billionaires” conveniently distracts from e.g. adding tax brackets to pay for increasing the ones we have.

If that environment/framework has been unjust, how could you remedy it? A taking seems deeply problematic to me. That said, a renewal of our nation's antitrust laws might be a more effective and palatable approach.