What could the billionaire founder and chief executive of Amazon.com possibly want with a dead-tree newspaper?
Jeff Bezos' historic $250 million acquisition of The Washington Post seems like a head-scratcher at first, but it's perfectly in line with what he's best known for: taking something old and dying, and turning it into something new and growing.
Why else would he have passed over the newspaper's online-only sister properties Slate.com and Root.com, along with Foreign Policy magazine? None of these three still toil in the world of newsprint and ink. It's that world that Bezos wants to disrupt (business lingo deems that a good word, by the way), just as he did the world of brick-and-mortar bookstores.
The good news for the Post is that Bezos — who has acquired the paper with his personal wealth, separate from Amazon — is unlikely to operate with a bean-counting mindset (but watch out, Marty Baron — he's reportedly a notorious micro-manager! The former Globe editor now heading the Post newsroom may be in for a daily earful). Bezos simply wouldn't be caught dead living in a world of annual layoffs punctuated by periodic buyouts and miscellaneous margin-driven cuts, as virtually all newspapers in America would concede as reality.
Though the Post will remain, at least for now, separate from Amazon, Bezos could easily team up the enterprises on projects, especially given the blind deference he commands from voting shareholders at his e-commerce powerhouse. Given that, I believe Bezos envisions his rein unfolding in three stages:
• Content: The Post is the ultimate content-generation organization, with its international reporting and home base in the capital. It is the perfect vehicle to produce exclusive material to feed into the Kindle e-reader ecosystem, which has struggled to compete with Apple.
• Delivery: Amazon's vision is to launch same-day delivery in every major city. From groceries to, yes, even your daily newspaper, Amazon wants to bring it to you.
• Expansion: If this is the start of cross-pollination between Amazon and the newspaper industry, the logical end result could be personally customized newspapers on demand to each Kindle.
Still, one can't ignore the Ghost of Partnerships Past. AOL was supposed to help reinvent the wheel at Time Warner Inc., and we all know how that story ends.
At Amazon, Bezos has had two main hallmarks: enchant and expand. Shareholders let him get away with razor-thin margins because they believe in his vision. And I can think of no industry in greater need of a visionary than newspapers.
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