The big news in newspapers ? that Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post ? was not even 24 hours old when shock and wisecracks about the unexpected $250-million deal began to give way to acceptance and even envy. What, many are asking, does Bezos, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, see in a 135-year-old newspaper that others do not?
If Bezos?s business history is any indication, don?t expect a quick answer and don?t expect any short-term fixes for The Post, which has suffered from years of sliding revenue and circulation. While terms like disrupter and innovator are often used to describe Bezos in his years at Amazon, he has also proved to be a long-term thinker, someone willing to buck Wall Street demands for big profits in order to invest in his company?s growth. Now that he is the private owner of The Post, it would not be surprising to see him worry little about turning a quick profit and instead push to upend the often ossified world of newspaper publishing, just as he did with books more than a decade ago.
Indeed, Bezos hinted in a letter to employees that he felt a ?need to invent, which means we will need to experiment?, and that ?there will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years?. But just what those experiments will be is anyone?s guess. Bezos said The Post would be run separately from Amazon, but there is little doubt that he will bring what he has learned over the years to the newspaper world.
?He?s done an amazing job of bringing e-books to reality,? said Matt Galligan, the co-founder of the mobile news start-up Circa. ?There?s a strong likelihood that a similar transition could happen at The Post.?
The tech industry from which Bezos has emerged certainly has offered new ways to consume news. Start-ups like Flipboard, Digg, Pocket and Feedly have long been testing and building out alternative ways to read and consume information on the web and via mobile devices. That includes experimenting with news aggregation, recommendations and clever ways to bookmark interesting articles to read later.