Does Jeff Bezos signal a new golden age for journalism?

Salon had the best headline take on the news that Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and eccentric multibillionaire, has acquired the Washington Post: The iceberg just rescued the Titanic

Bezos represents internet era business, powerful companies with dna composed of bits and html. Washington Post represents the old, venerable media houses, expensive steam ships cruising obliviously toward doom on the digital oceans. Bezos stands for everything that old media fears. And yet exactly those properties,which seem so threatening, might be what could save journalism.

I’ve long argued that companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Samsung should be the natural born media moguls of the new economy. They are companies who understand the value in content, define the field of customer centric data mining and know how to build businesses around that kind of intelligence. Google, in particular, rules online advertising, having seized large portions of the web ad market that news outfits had hoped to thrive on.

Besides, many of the existing services from these companies depend on strong content. Google Now is all about timely updates concerning your immediate context (and just now beta testing hyper-local news flashes). Much of the best content served by search engines is produced by journalists. The map services incorporate restaurant reviews, travel writing and more. There’s Kindle, Ibooks, Google Books, Google Currents, Siri, Google News… all of which depend on great content.

When established media outfits no longer have the means to produce content of the right calibre — since they can’t crack the all-important digital monetization cipher — internet era companies will need to think hard about stepping up and producing their own quality content.

The cost of producing superb journalism — back-breaking for traditional media today — is all but negligible for the money machines of the internet era. And make no mistake, great journalism is extremely valuable to a core tenet of their business model, which is to offer their users the best possible tools to orient themselves in the world and in the currents of information rushing through it.

Now Jeff Bezos himself bought Washington Post, not Amazon. That might be, as Alan Mutter has suggested, because Amazon’s shareholders would have killed him if he had acquired it for Amazon — or it might be because of other reasons. In any case, this certainly feels like a starting point of a new era. And my guess is that it’s not an era where eccentric web billionaires buy newspapers to run as hobby projects but an era where the digital colossi start to throw money at serious but ailing content engines like the Washington Post to improve their own offers to their users.

I can sympathize with those Washington Post reporters who feel uneasy knowing that the paper is now nary one percent of a private fortune built on fierce cost cutting and selling stuff on the cheap. This is bound to create uncertainty, at least until Jeff Bezos motivations are fully revealed. But landing an owner who truly, deeply understands the new digital economy is surely a blessing.

So, Google Times, Apple Journal and Microsoft Chronicle?

In general companies like these have the potential to be great patrons of journalism. As long as they aren’t too dazzled by user data and manufacturing perfect click storms but take the time to listen to experienced publishers and journalists they could help usher in a new era of unprecedented innovation in publishing.

Out of these our digital ruins a new golden age for journalism might just arise.