From Puck, January 5:
Post Modernism Theories
Does Will Lewis, the Brit who just took over The Washington Post, have the hardest job in media? One week in and Alex MacCallum is off to CNN, and it turns out that his company’s traffic has dipped by more than 50 percent in the past few years.
On Wednesday night, Alex MacCallum, The Washington Post’s newish chief revenue officer, informed colleagues that she would be resigning from Jeff Bezos’s beleaguered newspaperco less than six months after joining and a mere two days after the arrival of its new C.E.O., Will Lewis. The rush announcement was precipitated by my earlier report that MacCallum, a digital product wunderkind previously involved in both The New York Times’ and CNN’s subscription growth efforts, had been in talks to return to CNN, where she would be reunited with her former Times boss Mark Thompson. In her new remit, MacCallum will oversee his ambitious effort to restructure the 24/7 news network into a multiplatform, semi-subscription-supported, digital-first brand—a mega mega-midmarket Times of sorts. Her appointment is now likely to be announced in a matter of weeks, if not days.....*****....The scale of the Post’s challenges, however, are of an entirely different magnitude. In addition to churning subscribers and losing $100 million a year, the Post is also failing to engage audiences. Four years ago, the Post boasted 139 million monthly visitors. By the end of last year, it had less than 60 million, according to sources familiar with its internal numbers. Of that audience, less than one in five read more than a single article per month, while less than one in 500 actually convert to a paying subscription.The data—yes, it really is that bad—suggests that the Post is not only suffering from the absence of a coherent business plan, but it is also suffering from a profound product problem.....
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