By John Gapper
Jack Ma of Alibaba, the $200bn Chinese ecommerce giant, is making an awful mess of the purchase of the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s English-language daily. He should take a lesson from his business rival Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.
“Trust us. Why do people have to think that if we have it, it will lose its independence?” Mr Ma asked indignantly on Tuesday at the World Internet Conference in the southern city of Wuzhen - an event demonstrating that “China has been on an upward internet spiral for 21 years, with Tencent and Alibaba becoming the beating heart”, according to news agency Xinhua.
The answer to Mr Ma’s question is an interview given by Joseph Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice-chairman, to the paper Alibaba bought this week for $266m. Mr Tsai complained: “There is too much of a focus on what is wrong with Alibaba . . . I’m not saying SCMP should step up coverage of Alibaba, but it should be more curious.”
Mr Tsai promised that Alibaba will not tell journalists what to report but he dropped hints about how to behave if they wish to stay employed. Western news organisations report on China “through a very particular lens” of hostility to communism, he said. “We see things differently, we believe things should be presented as they are.”
The trap into which Mr Ma has fallen is believing that news organisations should write what companies or governments regard as “responsible”. Most companies think journalists are too negative about them, and sometimes they are even correct, but trying to fight it is a misguided cause. If Mr Ma pursues it, he will discredit the paper by turning it into tame, predictable propaganda.
Mr Ma could yet play a vital role in restoring the SCMP, which has seen better days. Its tradition of independence and willingness to take on powerful interests remains as valuable in China as elsewhere. Other industry traditions, such as inefficiency, resistance to digital technology and preference for comfortable decline over disruptive change, do not.
Mr Ma is the latest of the technology press barons, including figures such as Mr Bezos and Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who acquired the New Republic magazine in 2012. They have the wealth, and hopefully the patience, to acquire titles facing digital competition and to help them adapt.
Many Washington Post journalists revered the Graham family, the paper’s former proprietors, but Mr Bezos has performed a remarkable service for the Post since he acquired it (with his own money, not Amazon’s) for $250m in 2013. Indeed, he has done a notably better job than Don Graham, the family scion who sold it to him.
The Grahams, although they were beloved stewards, curtailed the Post to a metropolitan daily with a strong circulation in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia and a limited presence outside. That was highly profitable as long as there was an abundance of print advertising but it left the Post more isolated than The New York Times in the face of digital competition.
Amazon has itself been subjected to plenty of tough, searching and critical coverage by news organisations - more hostile than the routine stuff Alibaba complains about - but as a proprietor Mr Bezos has wisely ignored that. The Post’s journalists have kept writing the same things as before.
Instead of moaning about bias, he has concentrated on efficiency and growth: two areas in which he has far more expertise than traditional news publishers mired in print. The Post appeared doomed to fade like other city dailies - outmatched in Washington by Politico, which was founded in 2007 by former Post journalists - but it now shows signs of recovery.
Mr Bezos has offered free digital access to subscribers to other US papers and discounted subscriptions to Amazon Prime members. The website, once a mess, is better looking and faster. It publishes more articles, some of them aggregated from other sources. Its digital reach is climbing and it has just overtaken the NYT in unique monthly visitors, with BuzzFeed in its sights.
One can argue with aspects of this and old hands do, observing that it carries gossipy articles to boost traffic. But, together with the bulk of its old authority, the Post at least has a pulse. Taking the best of its past and turning it into a national, perhaps global, publication is bound to be a long experiment.
As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once expressed in prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Rather than telling journalists to be nicer to China and Alibaba, Mr Ma should focus on what he is good at. Then the SCMP might have a future.
