What's Next for the Bezos-Owned Washington Post

Late last Summer, Amazon's Jeff Bezos bought the flagging Washington Post for a quarter billion dollars and the sale appeared to shock staffers, but others I was able to talk with seemed less concerned. Bezos himself described this as a personal effort to try to find a way to save something he held dear:

"The paper's duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we'll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely. I won't be leading the Washington Post day-to-day. ... There will, of course, be change at the Post over the coming years. That's essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about--government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports--and working backwards from there. I'm excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention."

So far, there seems to be no cause for concern. And, given the deep hole that most papers find themselves in today, it will be interesting to see if Bezos can find a way to leverage 21st technologies to save these institutions.

The article I wrote for Information Today's NewsBreaks is available here if you want to check out my reporting on the sale.

Can we really live without our daily paper? I guess many do. How might you work to save the venerable daily paper?