CONFIDENTIAL: To a billionaire trying to determine what to do with $250 million in 2013,
That kind of pocket change can buy you a newspaper. And not just any newspaper, but a world-class paper with a wall full of Pulitzers (I remember emerging from the elevator and marveling at it as a summer intern) and decades of experience holding power to account.
Alternatively, $250 million can buy half a superyacht. A yacht is a very big boat.
That newspaper employs hundreds of journalists. These journalists work very hard to find out what is actually happening and then to tell people. This involves a lot of late nights eating pizza in the office and long days calling people who will not answer and showing up in inconvenient places at inconvenient times to get people on the record and to get the story right. Is newspaper work glamorous? Put it this way: Spotlight was a Hollywood movie made exclusively to show off how heroic newspaper journalism is, and The New York Times ran an interview with the costume designer to find out how she managed to make the cast look so authentically unfashionable and rumpled. (“The hardest thing is making bad clothes work on really famous people, who look gorgeous in everything they wear,” the costumer explained.)
A superyacht has multiple decks.
Newspapers have multiple deks too (that’s some technical headline humor for you; the dek is the little subtitle under the headline that explains the headline you just read). They also have ledes (the start of a story) and are made by people filing (turning in their stories). I remember that when I first got hired at a newspaper, I kept telling people I couldn’t hang out, because I “had to file,” and my friends thought I had suddenly become obsessed with personal organization.
A yacht will never turn a profit, and it would be confusing to expect it to. 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 yacht’s owner and will not suddenly say, “Well, perhaps if we just pivoted part of the yacht sharply to the right and knocked dozens of people off, the yacht would suddenly become self-sustaining.”
A newspaper can certainly turn a profit. One way for a newspaper to make a profit is if you keep its subscribers from canceling their subscriptions en masse.
If your yacht fails to endorse a candidate for president in an existential election, people will say, “Good. A boat should not endorse candidates for president.”
A newspaper is a public service. If it does its job, people will have better information and better lives—difficult to quantify in monetary terms, but for a long time, we used to think that making people’s lives better was important and valuable. Andrew Carnegie did not demand to see exponential growth from his libraries.
You can give your yacht whatever name you want! Sunk-Cost Fallacy, Ship O’ Theseus, Redacted, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
A newspaper can take down a president—and has, in fact. (Of course, that requires guts from its owner. But you have guts, don’t you?)
A yacht is a good place for a foam party!
A newspaper is a guardian of the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson said that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Your yacht will never find out anything damning about your business. Your yacht will never find out anything troubling about the current administration. Your yacht will never report the names of slain children and abuses of government power and give a voice to grief and to silliness alike.
If the captain you have put in charge of your yacht keeps yelling that the yacht needs to be more nimble and take on 200 million more people, and you discover that instead of making the yacht more nimble, he has just punctured an enormous hole in the hull, causing water to rush in, this won’t leave hundreds of world-class journalists without jobs.
Nobody will keep filing from a war zone even with the looming threat of layoffs because they believe in the yacht so much. Nobody believes in the yacht at all.
If the yacht starts to sink, the captain will have to tell everyone on board in person.
If you have a midlife crisis and buy a yacht and then later stop caring as much about the yacht and want to go to space instead, you can simply dock the yacht and ignore it forever and an entire city will not immediately suffer as a result. When a newspaper is felled by careless or malicious owners, millions of people are hurt, in big ways and small ways and ways that are impossible to measure. That includes the journalists directly affected, of course, and then all of the people whose stories won’t get told, and then all of the readers whose mornings will be made just a little bit worse by the absence of their favorite comics or their favorite columns, all of the people who won’t know as much about their country or their neighbors—the restaurants they could visit, the shows they could see, the television they should avoid at all costs. This will leave big holes and little 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’re all going to be worse off.
