What Jeff Bezos Could Do With The Washington Post

The journalism world was astonished that Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos had purchased The Washington Post.

Astonished… and worried.

Now, the question loomed: What would Bezos do with the paper?”

Roy Greenslade, writing in The Guardian, thought that there were vast opportunities in ‘the digital world’ to merge the marketing power of Amazon to the failing newspaper’s fortunes.

Others suggestions ran the spectrum from the cynical view that Bezos might be simply buying influence in DC to those who thought this was almost a non-profit act of nobless oblige – social do-gooding.

All of them might be right.

However, allow me to suggest an alternative.

(Jeff Bezos, are y0u listening?)

I think that Bezos now has a unique opportunity to rescue not just a DC newspaper, but, remarkably, television journalism – which has a much deeper and wider viewer base than The Washington Post ever did.

Television news, I think we can all agree, is terrible.

And getting worse.

Superficial, banal, celebrity oriented and pointless.

For years, (like forever), television news producers began their day by reviewing the newspapers and then lifting the best stories for their own ‘evening news’.

Part of the reason behind this was the built-in cost of producing network news.

Each story required the commitment of a producer, a reporter and a crew.  That is expensive.

And there are only a very small number of crews and reporters available to assign on any given day – so every story that the network commits to has to make air.

There can be no failures.

So the assignment process becomes a low-risk proposition. Every assignment has to work out. And what better way to make sure that things work out than to simply replicate what a newspaper has already done.

Newspapers are different.

Producing a story for a newspaper requires nothing more than a good journalist and a laptop.

Send them out to find a story or check one out.

If it works, print it.

If it doesn’t work – no loss.

There are lots of other reporters at work.

The newspaper reporter is free to take risks

Which is why newspapers break many more stories (like all of them) than does TV news.

Now, Jeff Bezos has 640 reporters working for him.

What Bezos has purchased here is not a newspaper (although it may look like one).   What he has purchased is a global news and information gathering and processing machine.
And a potentially very powerful one.

Properly re-tooled.

And a potentially very profitable one.

Give each of those reporters a small HD videocamera and a laptop with editing software (and train them!), and what does Bezos have?

He has 640 reporters and camera crews all over the world.

That makes him bigger than NBC News or CNN or The BBC.

And it makes him ready for the world of online video.

It makes Bezos the biggest digital news organization in the world.

With some of the world’s best journalists.

And at almost no additional cost.

A global platform for a new kind of journalism.

If the newspaper is never going to be profitable, you can bet that this would be.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013