It was recently announced that Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon has bought that great newspaper \u00a0\u2018The Washington Post\u2019. It\u2019s important to make the distinction that it is not Amazon that has acquired the newspaper; Bezos personally has bought it.<\/p>\n
Aside from being an invitation for every wag on the web to crack the obvious joke (\u201cJeff based on recent purchases you might also be interested in \u2018The LA Times\u2019, \u2018Newsweek\u2019..\u201d), it\u2019s interesting to speculate on just why Bezos has done this.<\/p>\n
Generally people buy newspapers in order to buy access, influence or respectability. They certainly don\u2019t buy heritage newspapers these days to make money (if indeed they ever did), or to help maintain a low public profile (Bezos is by all accounts a private person). He founded one of the most successful digital businesses ever and one has to assume that if he really wanted access to or influence over the great and the good he could make that happen without the encumbrance of a newspaper.<\/p>\n
We can set aside any theories about using \u2018The Washington Post\u2019 as a vehicle to promote Amazon, or indeed vice-versa, given that the purchase has been made privately as opposed to with corporate funds.<\/p>\n
One parallel can perhaps be found in the past. One eventual consequence of Rupert Murdoch entering the UK newspaper market was the modernisation of the industry. Murdoch moved all of his newspapers from their old hot-metal Fleet Street home, where (like every other newspaper proprietor) he was subject to a range of disruptive tactics by the print unions, to Wapping, where journalists entered copy directly from their computers, and where electricians rather than the print unions made up the workforce.<\/p>\n
The move to Wapping in January 1986, made overnight and without a single edition lost is one of the great stories in newspaper history (Linda Melvern\u2019s book \u2018The End of the Street\u2019 chronicles this period brilliantly. It\u2019s available from you-know-where at the time of writing for \u00a30.01). Others followed; the industry was changed forever.<\/p>\n
Today, newspapers are metamorphosing from printed things to online things. Many are struggling to come to terms with this change \u2013 including journalists, advertising sales teams and old-style newspaper managers. As Aaron Levie, the founding CEO of Box, tweeted: “Industries are transformed by outsiders who think anything is possible, not insiders who think they already know what is impossible.”<\/p>\n
Maybe as an outsider Jeff Bezos simply loves newspapers. Maybe he has a vision that involves taking one of the greatest newspaper brands into a digital future. One thing\u2019s for sure \u2013 he\u2019s the first digital superstar to take on a newspaper and thus to become what used to be referred to as a press baron.<\/p>\n
Transforming a print-based industry reliant on paper into one that uses digital technologies to build and maintain a dialogue with customers sounds like the sort of challenge that might appeal to Jeff Bezos. After all, he\u2019s done it once before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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