Josh Benton

I think there really was an opportunity for the Post to have another good stretch editorially and financially.

And I think you can point to some decisions that Bezos made as reasons why that didn't happen.

I've seen dozens and dozens of tech companies and startups and AI companies who tend to view news as a world of inefficiencies that are waiting to be quote-unquote fixed.

They look at a newsroom which hires expensive people to do a lot of manual gathering of information and manual writing up of that information or production of podcasts or videos about that information.

They see a process that...

they think can be rendered more efficient and can have a lot of the cost structure ripped out of it.

I am open to technological changes that could push in that direction.

If they find wonderful ways to create that universe, you know, I'd love to hear about it.

At the same time, I think...

At a time that we as a society are increasingly concerned about the role of a few large technology companies and AI algorithms that we don't have a lot of insight into, the amount of control that those institutions seem to have on very fundamental elements of the way information gets distributed, the way that the economy works, I think there's a real disconnect in values there that I think would be pretty difficult for anyone to navigate.

Gosh, that's dark.

I know.

It's a terrible question.

But at the same time, if you look at a place like Minneapolis and you look at the power that video images of things happening in the streets to someone like Rene Good, the impact that the right information can have on a political body, on a citizenry, on a protest movement, eventually on a government, that power in my mind hasn't been diminished yet.

It used to be that it was much more the realm of individual reporters and individual newspapers and television networks to dig up this information and to share this information.

Now there are many more potential inputs into that system, right?

But that doesn't, to my mind, reduce the power that information, accurate, timely information about the world around us can have in how society and government work.

I think that we had a sort of unusual glory period for a number of decades across the 20th century, where the things that were healthy for our democracy were also things that aligned really well with an advertising driven business model, right?

It didn't make a lot of sense at an intellectual level that the same people who would be reporting on what's happening in Baghdad or what's happening on some distant battlefield would be putting their work right next to furniture store ads and classified ads for jobs and all the other things that created this unusual mixture of elements that was 20th century mass media.

We were kind of lucky that those happened to align for a while and they very much do not align anymore.