The Bezos Way Link

Monday Note is linked more often in my new feed forJean-Louis Gassée’s take on Apple. But I’ve found that Frederic Filloux’s series on the modernization of the news media much more interesting. In his April 17 post Filloux applies some of Jeff Bezos' lessons:

Hence the implicit first lesson from Jeff Bezos: put the product and those who will use it at the center of your operations. Hire, train and transform the mentalities toward that goal. Media needs product people. They should be the stars of any company as much as great bylines.

For those unfamiliar, Filloux has been working on a mental model to fix (or at least reorient) the sinking ship of the newspapers and new media in general. From his April 10th post titled “What Web Page Structure Reveals on News Quality”:

I already addressed this question in the last Monday Note. Like for sources, it now seems indispensable to build a whitelist of news authors, in the broadest sense of the word. This database needs to include not only reporters and editorial staff, but also freelancers, selected bloggers, experts, and op-ed writers. Building it is not an easy task (I know it first-hand); among other hurdles, it is potentially a red-hot issue among journalists, and deciding on the criteria for whitelisting is tricky. But: a) it is quite likely that the largest distribution platforms already have or will create such a database; and b) making such data widely accessible is a must if we are to prevent the proliferation of misinformation.

I think this is something we all tried to do at one time but the massive amount of information being jammed down my gullet makes it hard to keep track of writers that I “trust.” There are a few, but to really build trust requires dedication to knowing the body of work of a writer. This comes with a cost. I must narrow my sources. This is easier to do without Twitter on my devices.