Bezos and the WaPo: All the content, and the technology
Printing presses and ink and paper were to the age of steam as the cloud is to pixels today
The value of the Jeff Bezos bet on The Washington Post is the possibility of monetization and content delivery in ways beyond banner ads and page views.
Think about it: movie reviews with links to the back catalogs of the director and all the actors; music reviews linked to downloads of all of the songs.
And maybe enough profits from the crosslinking of commerce and information to fund investigative journalism with internal subsidies the way the old school papers paid for the foreign bureaus with the cash from the ads, subscriptions, and the newsstand sales to sports fans and people who read the fashion pages.
It wasn’t so long ago that newspapers were hugely profitable, and press barons were moguls.
Newspapers more or less printed money along with the news for roughly a century, and journalists were stock characters in plays and movies; Superman and Lois Lane worked in the style patented by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
The profitability of the press follows the rough arc of the transition from partisan journals in this country’s founding years through the invention of mass media, when the telegraph and railroads changed the laws of space, time and information distribution as radically as the internet has today.
The practice of objectivity in the press arose with the new mass market possibilities that came with faster information; it started as a means of aggregating advertising dollars, and it became a professional stance.
Industrialization and urbanization grew the mass market; cities had many dailies — morning and afternoon — and Newspaper Row, in lower Manhattan (Park Row, today, near City Hall) was the core of it.
“By 1865, according to the U.S. census, 373 newspapers were being published in 428 editions, 54 of these in New York City.”
Papers became chains, and independents were bought up because there was money to be made.
When the math started swinging the other way with the rise of television and the growth of suburbanization, publishers had a choice: more quality and the hope of more readers, or cut costs and cut quality and maintain profits.
The latter was the direction they chose, and kept choosing, as those trends accelerated.
By the 1980s, a decade before the internet, the afternoon papers were gone and the surviving morning papers had started a slow bleed of declining circulation and cuts that squeezed out a little more money in the present at the cost of gaining readers for the future.
Then came the internet: newspapers invented classified advertising as a revenue model, but Craigslist invented it for the web, and there went the cash.
With one last chance to invest in quality or cut costs, publishers made the wrong choice, and offered readers less and less.
And now comes the Bezos buy of The Washington Post — a paper that was one of this country’s greatest. (I was a news aide in the Chicago bureau, back in the day, while I was waiting for the internet.)
The definition of journalism is publishing things that someone else wants to keep hidden; everything else is public relations.
Do that, do it well, make money at it — if Bezos can recast the machinery and the business model, others can follow.
The user experience changes — from paper to pixels; from home delivery to mobile; from consuming to commenting — but the mission is the same.
Get me rewrite: the story of newspapers, journalism and technology has just opened a new chapter.
