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Jeff Bezos Buys the Washington Post
schwit1 writes with word that Jeff Bezos decided to buy a news paper. Quoting the Washington Post: "The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family's stewardship of one of America's leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world's richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter."
The WaPo Labs team (including CmdrTaco) were not part of the deal, but from the sound of it they will remain part of The Post Co. and haven't been axed.
"I think it would be fun to run a newspaper"--Charles Foster Kane
"Woohoo! I'm going to work at Amazon! Free Prime!"
"So, wait, what, it's not Amazon? Just the owner of Amazon? Okay! Still pretty great!"
"Ummm... guys... it says he's not buying us... we're just left to rot here on the carcass. Anyone known any good jobs sites?"
He paid more than $25 for the newspaper. I hope he got free shipping.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
He's keeping the same Chief Editor, so its not clear to me how much it will change.
I expect him to make it free on Kindle. Seems like a long way to go to get content.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
...when newspapers feared the rise of the internet. Now we have all the new money buying one outright. Is Jeff going to keep it going out of nostalgia or dig a hole and give it a quiet burial out of regard for the old guard? Or will it become his personal editorial platform...
Reasons to buy any newspaper:
- Foreign bureau access
- Subscriber base
- Political posture
- Brain trust
- Support a specific community
- Keep a tradition going
- Take control of an adversary or adversarial outlet
I'm going with the political angle on this one...
The first batch of internet-made billionaires seem to be a reasonable nice bunch (by which I can only mean agree with my ideals).
They made more money than they knew what to do with, and quite a few of them have decided to take that wad and make a mark on the world with it.
I have no f'in idea if Elon will die on Mars, if Bill will eradicate Malaria, or if Jeff can generate unique editorial content to shape his country - but there's a little part of me that's just screaming 'yes'. He's not done it to make money, he's done it because he wants to - god knows, but I want to see what happens when journalists have a platform, the prestige and a backer with large piles of fuck-you-world money.
I just have a feeling that this is a bigger deal than Murdoch buying MySpace for twice the money.
Why does it seem everyone forgets what was legally available before Apple started iTunes? Apple's biggest contribution wasn't that they have music available. It was that they finally convinced/forced the major music conglomerates to license the music for a sensible price, with sensible DRM, on a per song basis.
Before that you had the pirate mp3 sites and file-sharing programs at one end of the spectrum, and overpriced offerings with horrendous DRM from the publishing houses at the other end. That included physical CDs with rootkits.
The other aspect of iTunes I don't see anymore is that a large fraction of the sale price of a song goes directly to the artist. Before this, they were lucky to get pennies per song, with no way to verify numbers sold.
I don't even use iTunes, or digital music hardly at all. I've only recently added some of my CDs to my smartphone, and that only because my car stereo is broken. But I can remember all the praise for Apple when they broke the music industry's death grip on digital distribution.
Posting AC because I have probably offended someone here, and don't need the grief that brings.
Simple. Bezos answers to Bezos and Amazon answers to stock holders. Now Bezos can easily afford the post, float the content to Amazon (which enriches him as well, since he owns part of it) and the stockholders and pundits have nothing but good things to say about the whole thing. I would have done the same thing. Had he purchased it with Amazon money a whole freaking slurry of controversy and weeks of discussions would have ensued among various stakeholders and finance media. Who wants that? This may be a result of the trend of the stock market acting short-term. It is much easier for Bezos to purchase it and "sell" the content to Amazon than it would be to field the angst over Amazon purchasing it and trying to monetize it.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If you want instant, as it happens [...]
Fortunately, "instant, as it happens" is frequently inaccurate and generally a waste of time.
I'm not in Venice, CA. No one I know is in Venice, CA. So I don't really need "instant, as it happens" information on things that happen in Venice, CA. I can certainly wait until the next day to find out what happened. I'd rather have accurate information the next day than misinformation now.
He paid $250M? Doesn't he know it's only $1.99 on Kindle?
I'm not sad. I'm interested to see what form the experimentation will take.
Basically any kind of unplanned seat of the pants experimenting is superior to the existing newspaper plan of trying to have the ship grind down the iceburg until they can pass through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you under the impression that he's buying the company without its staff? Yes, a newspaper needs reporters and editors and printers. Guess what? The Washington Post already has those things!
Have you looked at the state of modern "journalism" in the US? It's a travesty, worse than the official government newspapers of many countries, today's "journalists" are essentially stenographers for the PTB. In many cases what is printed is nothing more than a slightly re-worded version of the official press release. In some cases they don't even bother with a re-write, and yes, I'm referring to "articles" printed in the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times and Chicago Tribune. (Still better than the "news stories" written, recorded, and distributed free of charge by industry and government organizations and broadcast on cable TV, but not much.)
Bezos lacks an understanding of how the world works? What planet are you living on? Here on Earth his company has operations in over 80 countries, is at the leading edge of the cloud computing revolution, has created several different markets for goods and services that never previously existed, has a logistics system that spans the planet, and generates more profit than the tax revenue of most countries.
You object that newspaper owners need to do things like get people interested in how the government works, reveal the reasons for the official spin on certain stories, and the like. Good points, but the CURRENT ownership isn't doing any of those things, and in fact has a history of cooperating with propaganda operations against US citizens dating back to the 1950s. Don't forget that Phil Graham freaking **RAN** the Project Mockingbird for the CIA.
All in all, I don't think that Bezos can do a worse job of running the Post than the Grahams currently are doing. At worst he might bankrupt it a few years earlier, at best he might make it into the sort of newspaper it always claimed to be.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin