Jeff Bezos' Shocking Washington Post Buy Was Not A Business Deal — It Was A Cultural Statement

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http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-shocking-washington-post-buy-was-not-a-business-deal--it-was-a-cultural-statement-2013-8


Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire at a news conference during the launch of Amazon's new tablets in New York, September 28, 2011.

The sale of the Washington Post to Amazon founder and multibillionaire Jeff Bezos for $250m – just under 1% of his wealth – reads like the coda of a Tom Wolfe novel. A great American institution is bought by an internet entrepreneur, part of a Silicon Valley elite, whose rocket-ship ride to stratospheric wealth has coincided with the implosion of the galaxy of influential brands born before the era of the microprocessor.
It is the first newspaper purchase in over a decade that has shaken American journalism out of its sleepwalk to oblivion, and made the wires hum with something other than bad news. Has this changed the narrative of inevitable decline? A seriously successful son of the new economy has dropped a small amount of pocket change on a title of international significance, but uncertain outlook. Bezos is a man who can afford $42m to spend on a giant clock built inside a mountain – which, one might speculate, is a relatively safe investment compared with a newspaper that has recorded seven consecutive years of declining income.

The motivation of Bezos to buy a newspaper will, no doubt, be picked over in the financial pages, but this is not a business deal; it is a cultural statement. News is not the industry that it once was, or an industry at all. It is a cultural good, the format and delivery of which needs remaking for a different set of consumer needs and capabilities.

It is highly unlikely that the immediate key performance metric for the Washington Post's new owner will be increased profitability and a soaring share price. Or any share price. In a finely-worded, short and poignant letter to the staff, proprietor Don Graham noted that in discussing the Post's future with publisher Katherine Weymouth, they "began to ask ourselves if our small public company was still the best home for the newspaper".



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