Is Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post trying to turn itself into BuzzFeed?

Washington Post; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI

The struggling Washington Post has a new plan: Launch a new news site.This one seems like the opposite of the existing Post: It will be focused social media, for a broad audience.It’s going to be hard to pull that off — especially when the Post is still operating the old Post at the same time.

The Washington Post is in trouble. It’s bleeding money, and its audience is shrinking. Its owner — Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013 — wants a new plan.

And that plan is … make a new version of BuzzFeed?

That seems to be what the paper’s leadership has announced, using different words. Here they are, via CEO/publisher Will Lewis:

I am excited to let you know that later this year we will be launching a new division of the newsroom entirely dedicated to better serving audiences who want to consume and pay for news differently from traditional offerings. This third newsroom will be comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.

That’s not a ton to go on — and a Post PR rep declined to comment further — and there are some basic questions left unanswered here. (For instance — what exactly is “social media journalism?” Making TikToks? Writing stories about TikToks? Makings TikToks about TikToks? All of the above?)

Still, it’s quite clear that Lewis, installed by Bezos last fall, has surveyed the existing Washington Post business strategy — run a newspaper with national ambitions and a subscription-based revenue model — and concluded that it didn’t work. So the new, yet-to-be-named thing will be something else.

It’s possible that some kind of subscription may be part of the new thing — note Lewis’ reference to “pay[ing] for news differently.” But it sure feels like the aim is to make news and news-adjacent stuff that reaches a much bigger audience than the Post does today, using social media platforms, and to monetize that attention with ads.

And if that sounds familiar, it’s because we saw a lot of that in the last round of digital media, where companies like BuzzFeed and Vice (and Business Insider, the site you’re reading right now) attach themselves to Facebook and its rocket trajectory. The problem was that when Facebook’s goals diverged from publishers’ goals, the publishers were left by the side of the road.

Which isn’t to say that running a large, mostly free, advertising-based digital media company is a guarantee for failure. It may still be possible to pull that off, especially if you can keep your costs low (While Lewis’ note also mentions “embracing AI to help,” it’s worth noting that he was asked about staffing plans at an all-hands call on Monday and provided a non-answer, according to an employee who listened to the meeting.) The UK’s Daily Mail, for instance, has built a very large business with free, clickable headlines.

It’s also reasonable for a new manager to show up at the job, assess that the old way wasn’t working, and want to make a dramatic pivot. And just because many publishers are increasingly relying on subscriptions instead of social media doesn’t mean they’re right, either.

The more concerning part of Lewis’ plan is that he now has two plans: There’s The Washington Post, which will presumably continue to act like the old Washington Post. And there’s the new, unnamed version of The Washington Post, which will operate very differently.

And while Lewis can expect to have some kind of synergy between the two operations — his existing ad sales team, for instance, will be telling themselves the new operation will give them the ability to reach a different set of clients — that can’t go that far. If this thing works, it will be because he’s figured out how to operate two newsrooms, with two different goals, in an environment that’s so challenging that it’s taxing the patience of one of the world’s richest men. Good luck with that.