Monday, the Washington Post reported that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is buying the paper:
The deal represents a sudden and stunning turn of events for The Post, Washington’s leading newspaper for decades and a powerful force in shaping the nation’s politics and policy. Few people were aware that a sale was in the works for the paper, whose reporters have broken such stories as the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandals and disclosures about the National Security Administration’s surveillance program in May. For much of the past decade, however, the paper has been unable to escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other “legacy” media organizations. The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies, scattering readers and advertisers across a radically altered news and information landscape and triggering mergers, bankruptcies and consolidation among the owners of print and broadcasting properties.
I've already seen a lot of confusion and trepidation about this. For every success of Amazon, there's been a failure like Pets.com. Amazon.com is incredibly secretive. That maybe doesn't work so well for a newspaper. Plus he killed the bookstore.
But Bezos isn't necessarily going to run the Post like Amazon. And really, how much worse could he do at running newspapers than Gannett, currently dealing its own publications an agonizing slow death by a thousand paper cuts?
