Amazon’s CEO has driven his company to all-consuming growth (and even, believe it or not, profits). Today, though, as he deepens his involvement in his media and space ventures, Bezos is becoming a power beyond Amazon. It has forced him to become an even better leader. ... More has gone right for Bezos lately than perhaps at any other time during his two-decade run in the public eye. His company is expanding internationally and spreading its hydra-headed product and service offerings in unexpected new directions. Bezos, too, is evolving. Always a fierce competitor and stern taskmaster, he has begun to show another side. With the Post, he’s taken a seat at the civic-leadership table. And with his various projects Bezos is also becoming known as a visionary on topics beyond dreaming up new ways to gut the profit margins of Amazon’s many foes. ... Bezos is preternaturally consistent. He still preaches customer focus and long-term thinking. Yet of necessity, as Amazon has become massive—and as he has indulged his eclectic and time-consuming pursuits—he has become the sort of leader who empowers others.

Many in Turkey worry the failed takeover will only hasten the end of independent journalism there. In recent years, Turkish journalists have described a climate far worse than anything they can remember. TV stations critical of the government have been dropped from the state-run satellite broadcaster—one of them, the pro-Kurdish IMC TV, in the middle of a live interview with Dundar and Gul. Foreign journalists have been deported and denied entry to the country, and last fall mobs led by a prominent young politician in Erdogan’s party twice attacked the Istanbul offices of the newspaper Hurriyet. Reporters Without Borders lists Turkey 151st out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index, between Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In June the watchdog group’s Turkey representative was arrested and placed in detention on charges of distributing terrorist propaganda. ... Under a law that criminalizes insulting the nation’s leader, more than 2,000 cases have been opened against journalists, cartoonists, teachers, a former Miss Turkey, and even schoolchildren in the past two years. ... Most of its income comes from newsstand sales: Its circulation hovers around 50,000, and at 1.5 Turkish lira (49¢), it’s slightly more expensive than most papers. That funds operations, ink and paper, and the modest salaries of its staff of 200. ... The paper faces the same problems papers face everywhere, as younger readers get their news from social media and the internet destroys the newspaper business model.

Ferro, who declined to be interviewed for this story, began his career as an entrepreneur, launching companies in the 1980s and ’90s, including a software startup. By the time he met Fiasco, Ferro had long since transitioned from creating businesses to buying them—especially ones in financial trouble. And for an investor in distressed companies, few industries have targets as numerous and tempting as newspapers. ... The Ferro era at Tribune has quickly become one of the more baffling chapters in media history. Within eight months, Team Ferro has rejected one purchase offer, angering shareholders; promised to unveil a “content monetization engine” that would unleash newspapers’ true potential as a “rock star business”; posted a want ad for an employee to assist “news content harvesting robots”; rejected another, more lucrative purchase offer; rebranded Tribune as Tronc, or tronc, as the company insists; and split and re-rebranded tronc into troncM, for media, and troncX, for exchange. ... corporate renaming ignited extended spasms of #tronc mockery on social media. Sample tweet: “WHAT YOU GONNA DO WITH ALL THAT JONC ALL THAT JONC INSIDE YOUR TRONC.” ... yet, until recently, Ferro was on the verge of laughing all the way to the bonc, as it were. ... now the spotlight is back on Ferro and his vision for saving journalism.

In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news. ... The sites’ ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated advertising engines, like Google’s AdSense. ... Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371. ... It was once a town of modest glory, turning out revolutionaries and intellectuals and alive with industry. One of its largest factories, a ceramic works named Porcelanka, employed 4,000 people. For a time, its residents recall with perverse pride, Veles was the second-most polluted town in the former Yugoslavia.

The main goal isn’t simply to maximize revenue from advertising—the strategy that keeps the lights on and the content free at upstarts like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox. It’s to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering (which, for the Times, is journalism) while continuously adding new online services and features (from personalized fitness advice and interactive newsbots to virtual reality films) so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones.

The founder of the Infowars website has been living in his own world for the last 20 years. It's a world of clear friends and clear foes, filled with intrigues and scandals, cover-ups and conspiracies. Jones is convinced that the global elites have formed an alliance against the United States to destroy the country. He disseminates this message five days a week on the Alex Jones Show, broadcast from Austin, Texas. His show is aired on more than 100 radio stations, and his website reaches millions of Americans. ... It was already cause for dismay at the time that Trump was aligning himself with Alex Jones, a man who has said a lot of crazy things throughout his life. For example, he believes the government possesses weather weapons it can use to create artificial tornadoes. ... "I constantly see propaganda everywhere."

Located in Hunt Valley, Md., little-known Sinclair is the nation’s largest owner of broadcast TV stations. It has 173 of them, mostly in small markets (Sioux City, Iowa; Fresno, Calif.; Little Rock), but with several in larger metropolitan areas as well (Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Washington). Whatever a particular station’s network affiliation—ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, or NBC—Sinclair viewers get a steady dose of conservative political commentary. Lately, Executive Chairman David Smith has begun assembling a kind of junior varsity squad of commentators and making unspecific murmurings about competing head-to-head with the senior lettermen and women at Fox News. To left-leaning viewers only just becoming aware of the company’s reach, Sinclair is positioned to flip a switch and turn those 173 stations’ newscasts—currently delivering bulletins on weather, school closings, and local affairs—into a cohesive network that pushes a Fox News-esque worldview of outrage and conflict into individual cities, counties, and towns. ... In May the company announced it was buying Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. Among other assets, Sinclair would add 42 TV stations—including major ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—if the deal is approved by regulators.