David Byler

I don't get putting Kamala Harris high in 2028 draft, rankings, qualitative estimations, etc. It's name recognition! The second someone (artfully) reminds voters "She's the only person in history to lose the popular vote to Donald Trump" it's all gonna fall apart

I don't get putting Kamala Harris high in 2028 draft, rankings, qualitative estimations, etc. It's name recognition! The second someone (artfully) reminds voters "She's the only person in history to lose the popular vote to Donald Trump" it's all gonna fall apart

This part of the Matt Murray email to WaPo staffers makes me most depressed about the paper's future. What you've got here is a media company where the owner has not only overhauled strategy but also required that new leadership pursue a Bad Strategy and demonize the very thing that recently made them successful. WP's recent golden age coincided with the paper projecting a clear stance against White House overreach. Even a far-right conservative can see that the "democracy dies in darkness" years saw a boom in subscriptions, as liberal readers patronized a news organization that was fiercely reporting on and standing up to an unpopular president. Current leadership wants to not only abandon that position but also demonize the idea that such a stand is journalistically or financially suitable. This makes no business sense. It's like a bizarro perestroika; except rather than the Soviet Union rejecting failed communism for political reasons, it's Bezos rejecting a successful business model for personal/political reasons. WaPo has made many, many strategic errors in the last few years—letting Politico walk out the door, failing to build a Politico Pro model, failing to build its own Punchbowl business, failing to build a big events biz, letting Ezra walk, over-hiring as subs declined, failing to copy the NYT's evolution toward becoming a lifestyle brand with games and cooking, etc—but what makes me most pessimistic about its near future is that Bezos has apparently made it mandatory that current leadership abolish all memory of the newspaper's recent triumphs and install a new strategy with no track record of success.

Just a quick newsletter today on the sad state of the Washington Post. This chart tells the story.

I also wonder if election twitter circa 2015 is a victim of its own success Back then, getting stats-oriented thinking into the mainstream, being empirical, etc was a project A lot of good faith people who wanted to become numerate, well, did! And a lot of the remaining non-numerate people are kinda bad faith. So now that that's kinda done -> the combative parts of elections-world (that were always there to some degree!) take up more of the mental space

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a friend writes: "I feel like everyone who was a part of this world pre-2016 has, on average, a basic level of friendliness. We all remember when bad columnists were the big problem. But the Gen Z crop of data folks just wants to kill each other"