Media Companies

2013.09 - New York (Magazine) - In Conversation: Michael Bloomberg

Interviewer: Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post. John Henry just bought the Boston Globe.

Bloomberg: I saw that.

Interviewer: Good investments?

Bloomberg: They are not good businesses. The media world is changing. Newsweek and U.S. News, two of the big newsweeklies nationwide, go out of print, and Time magazine’s thinner than it was before. There’s something changing. Whether it’s good or bad for democracy, whether it’s good or bad for the public, I don’t know, but it’s changing. The print circulation of the Daily News has gone from 660,000 to 330,000 in four or five years.

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I think the future of print journalism is problematic. Why Bezos bought the Post, I have no idea. He said that he wasn’t going to get involved in it. What’s the point of owning it if you don’t? Certainly not to make money. If you wanna have fun, buy the New York Post.

Interviewer: So you should buy the Post.

Bloomberg: No. I would try to upscale it, and that’s what would destroy it. Plus, I heard this weekend from somebody who probably does know about the Post, and he says it’s losing over $100 million a year. That’s a lot of money for a vanity thing.

Interviewer: It’s tough out there on the Internet.

Bloomberg: It’s just another disruptive technology that has come along. You may want to do this story sometime: Try to figure out where the jobs of the future are gonna come from. My ­barber—it’s not inconceivable at some point you’ll stick your head in a box, and boom, out you come all coiffed. It is a very big problem for society. The knowledge world destroys jobs. I was on a panel with Mark Zuckerberg: “We’re gonna create so many jobs.” Go to Google and you’ll be shocked at the lack of diversity and how few people really are creating all that stuff.