Bezos Buys Washington Post: What Do You Think?

The front page of the Washington Post announcing its own purchase shows much of what is wrong with newspapers today.

"Grahams to sell The Post," the headline blared, and had me shaking my head.

Had that been any other business deal, wouldn't the Post have trumpeted the new owner? Why was it looking backwards?

Well, we know the answer. The Post management made up a headline that reflected their own perspective before anyone else's which is not uncommon in the business. Readers too often come second, particularly on stories that involve the newspaper's company. A friend of mine at a midwestern newspaper once had to research a story about how much executives in town made...but when he asked his own executives, they no-commented him.

It was the same at the San Jose Mercury News, where I used to work and where the management was never treated with anything but kid gloves. Had any other company done what the Merc's owner, Media News did, which is to buy every paper in the Bay Area except the San Francisco Chronicle (and including the Santa Cruz Sentinel), they would have called it a monopolistic practice.

But the person who owns the press usually has the last word, especially when it's about him. 

The real problem with this headline is that it looks backwards, while everyone else is looking forwards. It should have read, "Amazon Billionaire Buys Post" and asked what will Amazon's successful founder bring to the game? Will it be better or worse than what was there?

The Grahams saw the writing on the wall and  cut out just in time, just as old Mercury News publisher, Tony Ridder,  took his millions, bought a jet and flew off a decade ago.
 
The Boston Globe was sold by the New York Times to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry for $70 million a few days before the Post sold. The Times had bought the paper for $1.1 billion in 1993. No one would argue here that an old news company knows more about how to run a business than an Internet company, would they?

Bezos, who is worth $25 billion, bought the paper for cash and will take it private, where it will no longer be subject to whims and necessities of reporting to investors. It can focus again on news, not profits. It's more or less couch change for Bezos. He could afford to lose $250 million a year and still keep the paper in business for a century.

Not that he will. While so many of the country's frivolous rich spend their money on sports teams, yachts and ego gratification, Bezos, like Stephen Jobs before him, has moved into a playing field that desperately needs help monetizing. How to keep the public informed and pay the people who do it? Maybe he'll come up with the answer, the way Jobs did it with iTunes. He couldn't do any worse than the New York Times has done.

As the chair of journalism at Cabrillo College, the sale gives me high hopes for journalism, as does this experiment in hyper-local news, Patch. It's time people took local reporting seriously again and realized that if they don't, the manipulative likes of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will hold all the cards of public opinion.

What do you think is in the cards?