This week we discover that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has purchased The Washington Post and its sister papers for a cool $250 million. This venture will be kept separate from Amazon due to the fact that it was purchased by Bezos himself and not the company. A letter written to the Post employees reassures them their jobs are secure, or as secure as can be considering the changing media landscape.
The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.
The newspaper industry is notorious for being a bad business investment. Profits are slim and scarce and with the onslaught of the internet, blogs, citizen journalism and up to the second news available on Twitter (be it true or not) profits are destined to get even slimmer as time progresses. Considering Bezos founded Amazon on an idea and a vision, not reporting decent profits right off, he seems to be the ideal new owner. Washington Post Co. chairman and CEO Donald Graham seems to be please with Bezos taking the helm, going so far as to tell employees during a meeting that he was convinced “Bezos is committed to quality journalism and has no political agenda.”
Over the weekend, Billionaire John Henry purchased The Boston Globe. With both of these major papers going into private hands, they no longer deal with being publicly traded and dependent upon keeping shareholders happy and posting ever increasing profits. Only time will tell if these independent owners with virtually unlimited funds will help rejuvenate the newspaper industry.
As a side note, conspiracy theories has already hit the air as to why Jeff Bezos would (a) choose to buy a newspaper and (b) choose The Washington Post, DC’s hometown paper. Breitbart.com’s Editor-At-Large, Ben Shapiro, has come up with the real reason that nobody else has thought of. Apparently it is to use
The Post (is) Bezos’ latest political tool in a crony capitalist effort to work with the Obama administration. How else to explain President Obama puzzling decision last week to roll out his corporate tax plan at an Amazon.com fulfillment center?
The sale of the Post was supposed to be top-secret, with staffers asked not to tweet about it for ten minutes. But it’s more than possible that the Obama administration had some advance notice about the sale, and that Obama appeared at the Amazon warehouse as a sign of good faith to Bezos prior to the move.
Of course the Bush administration’s links to Big Oil and Halliburton was not the same. Neither is Fox News’ relationship with the Republican Party. Only time will tell who is right, but in the meantime, I’m going to go update my wish list on Amazon and further the Conservative Right’s conspiracy theories.
New Media Monster 