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Voxpress:

Should you buy a newspaper or a yacht?

2026-02-06 17:10:40Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Jeff Bezos

Advice for Jeff Bezos

Alexandra Petri – The Atlantic

CONFIDENTIAL: For a billionaire trying to determine what to do with $250 million in 2013.

With this money you can buy a newspaper. And not just any newspaper, but a world-class newspaper with a wall full of Pulitzer Prizes (I remember getting out of the elevator and marveling at it as an intern) and decades of experience in holding power accountable.

On the other hand, $250 million can buy half of a superyacht. A yacht is a very large boat.

That newspaper employs hundreds of reporters. These reporters work hard to find out what's really going on and then tell people. That includes many late nights eating pizza in the office and long days calling people who don't answer and showing up in inappropriate places at inappropriate times to get people to come in and get the story right.

Is working at a newspaper glamorous? That said: Spotlight was a Hollywood movie made exclusively to show how heroic newspaper journalism is, and The New York Times published an interview with the costume designer to reveal how she managed to make the cast look so authentically unfashionable and messy.

(“The hardest thing is making bad clothes work on really famous people, who look amazing in everything they wear,” the costume designer explained).

A superyacht has several decks.

Newspapers also have some decks (this is a technical joke for the main headline; the deck is the small subheading under the headline that explains the headline you just read). They also have the beginning of a story and are made by people who submit (submit their stories). I remember when I first got a job at a newspaper, I kept telling people that I couldn't sit down because I "had to submit," and my friends thought I had suddenly become obsessed with personal organization.

A yacht will never make a profit, and it would be confusing to expect that. But you know that your net worth is such that if the yacht never supports itself, you will still be proud to call yourself the owner of the yacht and you will not suddenly say, “Well, maybe if we just turned a part of the yacht hard to the right and knocked a dozen people over, the yacht would suddenly become self-supporting.”

A newspaper can certainly make a profit. One way a newspaper can make a profit is if it prevents its subscribers from canceling their subscriptions en masse.

If your yacht fails to support a presidential candidate in an existential election, people will say, "Fine. A boat shouldn't support presidential candidates."

A newspaper is a public service. If it does its job, people will have better information and better lives – hard to quantify in monetary terms, but for a long time, we thought that improving people's lives was important and worthwhile. Andrew Carnegie didn't want to see exponential growth from his libraries.

A newspaper can bring down a president – ??and in fact it has. (Of course, that takes courage from its owner. But you have courage, don't you)?

A yacht is a great place for a foam party!

A newspaper is a protector of the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson said that “if it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Your yacht will never reveal anything bad about your business. Your yacht will never reveal anything disturbing about the current administration. Your yacht will never report the names of murdered children and abuses of government power and give voice to grief and stupidity alike.

If the captain you put in charge of your yacht keeps shouting that the yacht needs to be more agile and take on 200 million more people, and you discover that instead of making the yacht more agile, he's just drilled a huge hole in the hull, causing water to flood in, that's not going to put hundreds of world-class journalists out of work.

No one will continue to file from a war zone even with the imminent threat of layoffs because they believe too much in the yacht. No one believes in the yacht at all.

If the yacht starts to sink, the captain will have to personally tell everyone on board.

If you have a midlife crisis and buy a yacht and later stop caring so much about the yacht and want it… If you go into space, you can just moor the yacht and ignore it forever and an entire city won’t immediately suffer as a result. When a newspaper is taken down by careless or malicious owners, millions of people are hurt, in ways large and small and in ways that are impossible to measure.

That includes the journalists directly affected, of course, and then all the people whose stories won't be told, and then all the readers whose mornings will be made a little worse by the absence of their favorite comics or their favorite columns, all the people who won't know as much about their country or their neighbors — the restaurants they can visit, the shows they can see, the television they should avoid at all costs. This will leave big holes, small holes, and invisible holes.

Think carefully before you buy. Do you really want to own a newspaper? Do you really have what it takes? Or do you just want to own another yacht? Please be honest with yourself, or we will all be worse off.


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