This will be a quick update. I’m writing a long overdue note to tell you about an upcoming event, in Philadelphia, on Thursday, March 28th. It’s going to be a dinner party, basically, but with me as the guest of honor, talking about all things Amazon. Here are the details:
Kind of a chill week for Amazon. No lawsuits from top executives, no stunning legislative revolts in Arlington, no breakthrough product announcements. But that doesn’t mean Amazon wasn’t up to anything. Let’s start with the three press releases that all hit yesterday, March 20th, because they’re seemingly basic, but actually really interesting.
Sports TV gets you closer to “real TV.” It’s live, it’s exciting, it’s something that people are used to accessing on either network or cable television; it’s irreplaceable. Look at last week’s deal with the Yankees to buy the YES Network to stream regional baseball games in New York. I doubt Amazon is going to try to pull this in every market, but its interest in sports programming is obvious.
Amazon is an online retailer (you might say the online retailer) and a logistics company built to support that retail business.
It’s many other things as well, but at its core, that’s what Amazon is.
In a different world, one that developed along the trajectory of the personal computer and the open web of the late 1990s, when Amazon was beginning to thrive, one might imagine that this would be all Amazon is. And by all likelihood, this would be a very successful company. Maybe as successful as Amazon is today.
Unlike previous weeks of this newsletter, there wasn’t a single dominant storyline about Amazon this week. Except maybe this one: an ongoing thread about disinformation. I like this story because it reminds us that despite all the heavy lifting Amazon does, despite the trucks and boats and shipping containers, despite its forays into groceries or robotics, it’s still fundamentally a purveyor of information, working in a marketplace where the primary currency is trust.
Here’s the problem. Amazon has a lot of anti-vaccination content on its site. A lot. Books, videos, and more. In search results, and in sponsored posts. Facebook and YouTube have already been through the wringer over this; this week, it was Amazon’s turn.
I can’t promise you a below-the-belt photograph or a massive win for neighborhood activists every week, but I can promise what I hope is compelling news and analysis about that company, with occasional tangents into both business theory and modern philosophy and literature. This week is no different. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to a special Orlando, Florida edition of The Amazon Chronicles. First, some housekeeping.
This was a happy moment late last night, clearing 5000 total subscribers:
A reminder: when we clear 500 paying members (which should happen soon), I’ll start adding original weekly features to go along with the news roundups and analysis. If that interests you, consider kicking in $5/month!
I say, the bridge is over, the bridge is over, biddy-bye-bye!The bridge is over, the bridge is over, hey, hey!The bridge is over, the bridge is over, biddy-bye-bye!The bridge is over, the bridge is over! — KRS-One, Boogie Down Productions
Today, Amazon announced it was shutting down plans to locate a satellite headquarters in Long Island City/Queensbridge, New York, bowing to fierce opposition from activists, residents, and city and state politicians. And I have time today! So you’re getting a special “The Bridge Is Over” edition of The Amazon Chronicles; this maybe the only time folks in Queens will actually enjoy listening to this song, because the people of Queensbridge actually won.
You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man. — Charles Foster Kane
Citizen Kane is one of those movies almost everyone has seen, but almost nobody really remembers, at least not in the way they remember The Princess Bride or Goodfellas or Star Wars. (“It's the greatest curse that's ever been inflicted on the human race,” says Jed Leland: “memory.”) For instance, everyone remembers that Citizen Kane is about a sled, when it’s really not about a sled at all; it’s about two marriages, a blackmail plot, and a tycoon who turns an empire built in one century, based on commodity goods, into a new empire for a new century, based on information.
I’ve compared Jeff Bezos to Charles Foster Kane before, in a story for Nieman Lab in 2013, when he bought the Washington Post. That comparison was a little more pat, based largely on the famous line from Kane, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” I argued at the time that in buying the Post, Bezos was looking to build a legacy for his close-knit family. But even then, I observed: “Citizen Kane is Jeff Bezos’ cautionary tale.” And behold: some of the tragic side of the Kane story, at least, has come to pass.
When I first started this newsletter, all of a week and a half ago, I had a very simple but unusual plan for how I was going to fund it and build it up. This is what it was:
So, here’s the deal. This newsletter—which I’m calling The Amazon Chronicles—will sell paid memberships. These will be $5/month, or $50/year. It will also offer free subscriptions. These will cost nothing. As long as I get at least 200 paid subscribers (let’s call them “members”), free subscribers will get all the same newsletters members get. Essentially, the whole site will be free to anyone who signs up. That will be a newsletter a week, rounding up the biggest and best Amazon coverage, plus original reporting and analysis. The same newsletter, for everybody. If I can get 400 members, I’ll move the newsletter publication rate up to twice a week. And again, free subscribers will get virtually all the same newsletters that paid ones get. (Paid members get some other benefits, like the ability to comment on stories, but nothing will be behind a paywall.) If I can get 1000 members, I’ll write the newsletter every weekday, Monday through Thursday. (I still have to do Noticing on Fridays.) That’s close to a full-time job. And the $5/month members are paying, which was costing you about $1 a newsletter, turns into something closer to 25 cents a newsletter. The more friends you can convince to sign on, the better your rate gets. What a deal!
Each day that’s gone by, and each newsletter I’ve written, I’ve understood the site and its mission better and better. I’ve also gotten smart feedback from smart friends, who in addition to supporting the newsletter with their dollars and their praise and by telling friends to subscribe, convinced me of two things:
Welcome back to the Amazon Chronicles, your weekly update on all things Amazon. We have more than five hundred new readers this week! Thank you all for spreading the word. And a very special thank you to my 386 paying subscribers, who make the newsletter free for everybody. You are all champs. If you missed last week’s post breaking down Amazon’s quarterly earnings statement, you can find it here.
Amazon announced its first-quarter earnings today. If you want to read the company’s release yourself, check it out here. There are also capable summaries and analysis here, here, and here. I’m going to try to do something a little different.
I have an unusual education for a technology reporter. I didn’t study journalism in college or graduate school. I have two undergraduate degrees, one in mathematics and the other in philosophy, and a master’s degree and PhD in comparative literature. I was interested in the way media technologies shape the way people think and write. That helped prepare me for my later jobs a little bit. But what I really learned how to do in being trained as a humanist was how to work a document, how to figure out what kind of work it’s doing, what kinds of rhetorical forms it employs, what kinds of authority it appeals to, and so forth. You have to trace all the vectors that make a text do work in the world. And an earnings statement is definitely a document designed to do work in the world.
Why does anyone care about Amazon’s earnings if they don’t have money invested in Amazon stock? Mostly because it's one of four times in the year when the company has to be relatively transparent about what it's up to. I say “relatively” and mean it. Amazon is not very transparent. You used to be able to find out how many iPhones Apple sold in a quarter, because Apple would tell you so themselves. Good luck finding out how many Alexa devices or Fire devices or Kindle devices Amazon has sold. So with Amazon, we have to do a little sleuthing. We have to reconstruct the business based on the available quantitative data, and, qualitatively, what the report’s authors say about that data. It’s all interpretation, based a little on experience and knowledge, a little on conjecture, and (usually), more than a little on groupthink—because what analysts and forecasters say about what’s going to happen often affects what actually happens. It’s the best hermeneutic circle ever.
Amazon is an elephant by design, and we’re all blind men. It may not even be an elephant; it could be five. — Paul Ford
I decided to start a newsletter about Amazon first and foremost because I wanted to read a newsletter about Amazon.
I love Casey Newton’s The Interface. The Interface is about “the intersection of social media and democracy,” but when it started, it was primarily a newsletter about Facebook. I’ve loved its evolution—the idea that when you pay particularly close attention to a particular company, all of its emanations and penumbras, all of the fields and subfields it touches and pulls into its gravitational well, have to be covered as well.
