The Washington Post is betting on a scale strategy out of the 2010s

It’s hard being The Washington Post. And I don’t just mean lately.

It was one thing to be the No. 2 general-interest newspaper in the country when your business model was still resolutely analog — local ads bought by local companies being delivered with local news to local front doors. But once everyone’s competing on the same platform online, you can start to feel like Bing to The New York Times’ Google. And over the past decade-plus — since the Times debuted its paywall in 2011 — its become numbingly clear that the Post just isn’t on the same level as its neighbors up the Acela.

As a business, to be clear. Journalistically, on any given politics or government story, the Post can still beat the Times, even if those occasions feel a little less common than they used to. But as a money-making concern, 11.6 million subscribers will beat 2-ish million any day.

Over this digital span, the Post’s strategies for competing have often involved the manufacturing of scale. A decade ago, it tried partnering up with as many local American newspapers as it could, offering a free Washington Post digital sub as a benefit for their local subscribers — an attempt to achieve audience scale. Soon after, it bet big on creating Arc, a publishing backend platform that aspired to be the CMS for publishers everywhere — and, more importantly financially, to extend those publishers into a massive advertising network. And then it built a genuinely interesting freelancer network that led it extend its reporting power around the country and globe. These sorts of initiatives blossomed after Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013. After all, who would value scale more than the man who built The Everything Store?

But the Post today is no longer the Post of 2013. So I suppose it’s not surprising that its newest attempt at scale fits today’s Bezos, who has taken a notable interest in the paper’s opinion section the past year or so. Here’s Ben Mullin in The New York Times (ouch):

The Washington Post has published some of the world’s most influential voices for more than a century, including columnists like George Will and newsmakers like the Dalai Lama and President Trump.

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.

Operate outside the paper’s opinion section — does that make this the near-mythical “third newsroom”?

While the Post’s scale strategies seemed smart in the early 2010s, this move feels like a time traveler from that era. “Let’s get a bunch of nonprofessional writers to give us stuff to put ads next to” was the sort of thing that execs at the Huffington Post did when they was trying to establish a brand, or that Forbes execs did when they were willing to gamble theirs. The Washington Post as a lightly curated Substack aggregator? Well, it’s a thought — just one that seems more aligned with pivot-to-video economics than today’s subscriber-driven equivalent.

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…

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.

I am probably more pro-AI-tools-in-the-newsroom than 95% of the journalism profession, but this gives even me a shiver down my spine. So long as humans are in the loop, can a system like this produce publishable work? Of course it can. Can it produce the sort of monetizable audience scale that would be necessary for it to make sense as a business? Color me skeptical.