Citizen Bezos: Journalism's New Best Friend?

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By Chris Taylor2013-08-05 22:45:12 UTC

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

I first met Jeff Bezos in a deserted Manhattan restaurant in 1998. Amazon was just about to start selling wine and household goods, as I recall, and Bezos was there to try and convince a young Time magazine reporter that expanding its repertoire beyond books was a good idea for the fledgling company.

He also had to explain why Amazon would survive the online onslaught of Barnes & Noble; why it wasn't, in the words of one analyst, "Amazon.toast." He did so with grace and intelligence, punctuated by that soon-to-be-famous verbal tic, the eardrum-bursting Bezos laugh.

See also: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Buys 'The Washington Post' for $250 Million

I started that hour extremely skeptical; I left it so impressed I nominated Bezos for Time's 1999 Man of the Year cover. In an era of dotcom shysters, I thought, this guy stands out. He gets the Internet.

Fast forward 15 years. Barnes & Noble is struggling to reinvent itself as a technology company. Jeff Bezos no longer has to explain anything to old media. Instead, he's buying it. The Amazon boss dropped $250 million — a small portion of his $28 billion wealth — and snapped up the venerable Washington Post from his friend Don Graham.

Journalists who once scoffed at the very notion of new media took to Twitter to express their shock and surprise.

So is Bezos a figure to be feared? No, he's the best thing to happen to old-school journalism in a long time. He understands its values. He has no agenda, other than making sure customers are happy with the product. He is used to businesses that operate at razor-thin profit margins. He gets new media in a way the Grahams never could, and opens up new distribution channels they hadn't even considered.

Bezos' company has already reinvigorated journalism with Kindle Singles. This delivers long-form narratives at 99 cents a pop to your Kindle, smartphone or tablet, and has been enormously popular since it launched in 2011. Journalists are chomping at the bit to get their best features on the platform, which is curated by a veteran journalist, former Village Voice editor in chief David Blum. Dwight Garner, a literary critic and former senior editor at the New York Times Book Review, praised Kindle Singles as a new genre of narrative.

Last month, Amazon added long-form interviews to the Kindle Singles repertoire — and President Obama gave a Kindle Single interview that was distributed for free. That's right; where once the President would have sat down with the Washington Post, he was now sitting down with Amazon. Which one is the relevant media company again?

Under Bezos, the WaPo can only become more relevant. It has no other direction to go in, other than to follow the Grahams' other former publication, Newsweek, into the recycling pile of history. The days of myriad inefficiencies and mounting debt are over. The days when the capitol actually paid attention to its paper of record could well return. It has to battle the Politicos of this world, not the Washington Times'.

Indeed, even that may be thinking too small. What if the WaPo could be delivered for free, automatically, every day, to every Kindle on the planet? Would the New York Times remain the national paper of record for long?

Regardless, who better to lead the paper into battle than a benign, tech-savvy billionaire? The home of Woodward and Bernstein is about to echo to the sound of the Bezos laugh; soon, many other papers will wish they could hear it too.

Image: David McNew/Getty Images

Topics: Business, jeff bezos, Kindle Singles, Media, washington post