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An opinion magazine called the Columbia Journalism Review recently published an attack on the owner of the Washington Post. The piece, by Hamilton Nolan and Siddhartha Mahanta, begins by absurdly claiming that “there are few humans on earth more incurious than Jeff Bezos.” For those who are unfamiliar with Mr. Bezos, he founded Amazon after an intensive 1990s inquiry to ascertain the ideal products for an online marketplace. More recently, he
created a space exploration company called Blue Origin and then traveled on its maiden human flight. Blue Origin describes the vehicle: All rockets take off; not all rockets land. Named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, New Shepard is Blue Origin’s fully reusable, suborbital rocket system built for human flight from the beginning. During the 11-minute journey, astronauts soar past the Kármán line (100 km/62 miles), the internationally recognized boundary of space, experiencing several minutes of weightlessness and witnessing life-changing views of Earth. The
vehicle is fully autonomous—there are no pilots. As silly as it is to cast Mr. Bezos as a person lacking intellectual drive, many readers are also bound to question the central theme of the piece, which is that one should not manage a news organization like the Post the same way one manages a productive business like Amazon. Mr. Bezos for his part has said that the Post “needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet” because if people won’t pay for the Post, then “it’s not a good enough product.” The authors of the Columbia piece write: If the media business is a science, then the task of managers is straightforward: Calibrate the proper inputs to maximize output. Implement the implementations that mathematical progress demands. If journalism is an art, then a newsroom becomes not a factory floor to be streamlined but an intellectual salon to be nurtured. Writers become stars to be encouraged, not labor units to be Taylorized.
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