Sally Buzbee Can Do What Her Male Predecessors Never Figured Out

Thanks to Jeff Bezos’ bottomless pockets and former Executive Editor Marty Baron’s atavistic editorial powers, taking the top editor job at the Washington Post in the summer of 2021 is somewhat akin to stepping in as the manager of the 1928 New York Yankees. You have inherited a franchise spinning with so much positive momentum and cred that you needn’t do much in the short term but activate the cruise control, tap the brakes to negotiate corners and avoid scraping the guardrails to be considered a success.

So, take care, but not so much care that people start calling you the caretaker. One reason you got the job is your relative youth: Today, you’re the executive editor of the Associated Press and a youthful 55. Places like the Post tend to pension off their top editors at 65, which gives you a decade to improve the paper and deserve a place in the history books alongside those of your esteemed predecessors Baron, Leonard Downie Jr. and Ben Bradlee. Not to get all Soviet on you, but a 10-year plan seems in order if you hope to “use the gifts the internet gave us,” as Bezos said when he bought the paper in 2013, and make the Post America’s top newspaper.

Under Bezos and Baron, the Post retreated from its Graham-era position as a local paper that did national and international news to a national and international newspaper that still does some local news. Bezos may have never said he wanted his Post to be more like the Times, which stopped pretending to be very local in the early 1980s as it began printing a national edition, but that’s been the outcome. As you know, the abandonment of local news made business sense because, to use the tech term-of-art, local news doesn’t “scale,” i.e., it doesn’t interest readers living outside the publication’s local footprint. The shift away from local helps explain why the Times now has 7.8 million subscribers (print and digital) today, and the Post has almost 3 million (according to an Axios estimate).

Bezos hates being No. 2 at anything, so if you’re to challenge or displace the Times, you’re going to need a bigger newspaper. The Post will soon have about 1,010 newsroom employees versus the Times’ 1,700. That’s not a fair fight. Your 10-year plan must include a strategy to reach newsroom parity with the competition or to come up with a plausible explanation why the Post doesn’t need as many bodies to make its arts, magazine, business, books, travel, culture and fashion coverage the equal of the Times. (Please don’t say the Post will do more with less.) Make it your first priority to shake some of those Bezosbucks loose; a billionaire is a terrible thing to waste. If Bezos can afford a $500 million superyacht, he can afford a Times-size newsroom. When Bezos bought the Post, he talked of providing the paper with a long “runway,” and he did. Now you need to persuade him to put some jumbo jets on it and let them take flight. If you don’t succeed, we’ll still wish you well and read your newspaper closely, but you’ll become the AP caretaker who let us down.

The Times has already colonized the American upper-middle-class’ weakness for consumer advice, cooking hints and crossword puzzles and games. Can that franchise be stolen? According to Digiday, the Times reaped $25.1 million from games, cooking and audio subscriptions in the first six months of 2020. I don’t know what the Times is paying its crossword editor, Will Shortz, but even if you had to pay him millions to defect, it would be worth the splurge. It wouldn’t necessarily close the gap between the two papers, but it would be a start. It’s also where the growth is: Axios’ Sara Fischer reported last week that a “record 44 percent of the Times’ new digital subscribers” came from products like cooking, games and audio last quarter. Will a hard-news maven like you embrace games and cooking? You should. Bezos famously said when he took over that readers won’t pay for a news story, but they will pay for a “bundle.” Bezos also said, “Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” Your job is to make him deliver on what he said.

In the old days, you probably wouldn’t have made the Post’s executive editor short list because you had no experience managing a newspaper. But the fact that the Post hired you, an AP lifer and leader of 2,800 journalists, signals that Bezos intends to make the Post more like the AP than the Times—a 24/7 continuous river of news and updates. If this is the case, you know more about that journalistic genre than I do and don’t need my advice.

Going from the cosmic to the microscopic, show you’re in charge by deleting that embarrassing “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Page One motto Publisher Fred Ryan and Bezos tacked on in 2017. The only thing it’s good for is as a punchline for jokes at the paper’s expense. As Will Oremus wrote in Slate when the motto was unveiled, “it sounds like a catchphrase more befitting a doomsday prophet than a daily newspaper.”

Nobody expects you to root for Donald Trump’s return, but it would make your job simpler. His hijinks filled the paper with political filth, fury and scandal for more than four years. Not just one impeachment, but two! Not just a contentious election but a riot at the Capitol! A special counsel investigation! Three sets of Supreme Court justice hearings! The botched pandemic strategy! The “shithole countries” controversy! The border! Trump’s Covid-19 infection! A major drone assassination! Trump kept all of American journalism on high alert, encouraged readers to spend more time with the Post and extend their subscriptions. With news like that pouring out of every Washington gutter (and backed by Bezos’ money), any competent journalist could have gotten a solid B or B+ grade over the same period as the Post’s executive editor. In lieu of Trump, perhaps the nation will find another means of going sideways. But if it doesn’t fill your news hole with disaster, that lifestyle coverage will be even more essential.

Before we hang up, just a few more words of instruction you didn’t ask for. Like other news organizations, the Post has yet to establish a coherent set of social media rules for employees, as Andrew Beaujon wrote in the Washingtonian. It’s beyond the scope of this column to suggest hard and fast rules, but the sooner you can establish a just policy, the better your tenure will be. Social media outlets like Twitter present problems yesterday’s editors never had to face. Individual reporters have built brands separate from their newspaper identities and a venue to air their grievances and criticism. Likewise, corporate Slack has become a place where employees unite and push back against your management. I have no advice for how to survive potential perils, only sympathy. Finally, you’ve got your work cut out for you in determining how much “work from home” will be tolerated when it’s medically safe to reopen the newsroom. It won’t be easy getting that genie back into the bottle. Whatever you do, don’t write a Washingtonian op-ed threatening to fire staffers who won’t return after you summon them!

If the expansion of the Post is your mandate—and how can it not be with Bezos as its owner?—remember you have one advantage the Times does not have: The Times is shoehorned in by its legacy as the paper that both the right and the left love to hate. The right hates the Times because it’s a liberal newspaper, its liberalness being a fact of nature that former Times public editor Daniel Okrent established in 2004. The left hates the Times because it’s not liberal enough. This gives, in theory, the incoming Post executive editor an enviable amount of running room to offend the left with tough coverage but not have to worry about starting a subscriber boycott. Tee up your best stories, and wage a plague on all ideologies. If you’ve got the goods, abuse the right, abuse the left, and do so with the confidence that no matter how you cover the news, you will never replace the Times on the leftists’ dartboards.

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Disclosure: My wife has worked for the Post for more than 20 years. Send darts to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts would give their left ones to be the editor of the Post. My Twitter account gave its left one and didn’t get the job. My RSS feed doesn’t play that game.