Ever since August 5 when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced he was buying the Washington Post, everyone I know and everyone whose columns I read has been talking about the deal.
Most reactions are negative which is unfortunate; the news business should be on the cutting edge of all kinds of progress, but too many journalists distrust new techniques and new media.
Like me, some of my friends are former journalists, and they tend to be pessimistic about what will happen to the Post, one of America’s best and best-known newspapers. Like all American newspapers – except for the Wall Street Journal – the new era of free digital news on newspaper websites has been tough on the Washington Post or WaPo as it’s known to news junkies.
One of the surprising things about former journalists and even some still covering news is how conservative they are – not politically, but in the way they work. They’ve resisted new media from the beginning; they distrust the opportunities the digital age offers for using a multitude of sources and telling a story in different ways to exploit the possibilities of video, audio, still photography, and internet links.
So for them the acquisition of WaPo by Bezos means the end of news as they know it. They reacted the same way when Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of August six years ago. The only motive they can attribute to Murdoch and Bezos is a desire to control news and the editorial process.
We don’t know what Bezos will do, but we already know that Murdoch has invested funds in the Journal’s newsgathering and left the editorial team alone. I think it’s likely that Bezos too didn’t buy WaPo to control editorials or direct how the news is gathered because there’s no money in that.
Behind both purchases of major newspaper titles by billionaires is the desire to unlock new sources of revenue in traditional media. Murdoch has been buying media titles in Australia, the UK, and here for years. Interestingly, his papers represent a variety of different types and were taken in different directions. It would have been hard to predict what would happen to each acquisition based on the previous one.
Unlike Murdoch, Bezos has no track record with newspapers; like Murdoch he knows how to make money. He has developed Amazon from zero to a game changer that controls sales of books and many other products around the world. Although he’s never owned a paper before, he bought WaPo for $250 million, an amount most of us can’t imagine which for a billionaire is practically chump change.
Being an optimist about the opportunities that new media offers for journalism today and will create in the future, I have hopes that Bezos will figure out how to make WaPo much more profitable that it has been over the past ten years.
The man who learned how to satisfy customers after Amazon had huge difficulties fulfilling orders in the early days may be able to come up with a new way to make journalism profitable.
If there is a way to finance news media at a time when print advertising is declining and revenues from digital advertising are nowhere near what print advertising used to bring in, I think Jeff Bezos can find it. And that will make all of us news junkies very happy.
By Dr. Alma Kadragic
Follow Alma Kadragic on Twitter: @almakad
