The Washington Post's Plan to Become Forbes, or HuffPo, or Substack, or Something
Benjamin Mullin
How are things going over at The Washington Post?
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.
If the plan is to completely destroy the brand and credibility built over decades of hard, important, and literally world-changing work, this is a good one. It takes a special group of strategic thinkers to look around the landscape and think that the answer is to become Forbes.
To be clear and fair, maybe their wisdom-of-the-asses-masses model has worked out for them financially – help WaPo clearly needs at the moment. It sort of seems like it hasn't, but who knows, there's too much of a constant swirl around the company to know much of anything. The model seemingly did work better for The Huffington Post – in that they found a sucker to buy them before their influence completely collapsed and they were sold again for penny stocks on the dollar.
Anyway, in a crisis, it's probably a fine model to copy – if the year is 2010. Unfortunately for WaPo, it's 2025. But, but, but... AI!
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.
Take the human-made slop and augment it with AI-made slop. Tell me more:
Ember, the A.I. writing coach being developed by The Post, could automate several functions normally provided by human editors, the people said. Early mock-ups of the tool feature a “story strength” tracker that tells writers how their piece is shaping up, with a sidebar that lays out basic parts of story structure: “early thesis,” “supporting points” and “memorable ending.” A live A.I. assistant would provide developmental questions, with writing prompts inviting authors to add “solid supporting points,” one of the people said.
Maybe we should be rooting for AI to become fully sentient and kill us all.
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. 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.
Ripple would be a big step in that direction. Executives involved with the project believe that it could reach a potential audience of 38 million U.S. adults, based on internal research, and that some of them would join a “talent network” to submit their own writing, two of the people said. The company is also planning to explore subscription bundles with partner publishers, one of the people said.
Again, 2010 called, they want their ideas back. The entire advertising-based business model for publishing is in the midst of collapsing as social sharing dies and web search shifts. So what exactly is the point of boosting pageviews? To convert more subscribers, I guess. But the core idea here, as stated, is for this content to exist outside the paywall.
Also, Bezos just put the paper through the entire shitshow of changing their policies to be more in line with his own – notably on the op-ed side of the house. And so are they only going to take such contributions from those also ideologically aligned with whatever those ideals are, depending on the political winds of the moment?
Bundling with other publishers is potentially more interesting, but it's going to be a hard sell to them. Their best hope may be convincing someone like Matt Yglesias – mentioned here as a target – that using the WaPo reach can be lead gen for his own Substack-based publication. But that's sort of a parasitic relationship, at best.
And perhaps even more awkward if the WaPo's true aim here is for Ember to become a sort of AI-first Substack? Please stop laughing!
Still, per a podcast he did last year with Peter Kafka, Yglesias might be open to such an idea? But per Mullins' reporting, it sounds like basically no one else is that was mentioned. For example:
One publication initially under consideration as a potential partner for Ripple was The Contrarian, an online publication co-founded by Jennifer Rubin, one of the people said. Ms. Rubin resigned from The Post after Mr. Bezos stopped the endorsement of Ms. Harris, sayingthe company’s leaders had abandoned values central to The Post’s mission.
The Post has since removed The Contrarian from consideration. When told that she had been under consideration at all, Ms. Rubin burst out in laughter.
I said stop laughing!
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler