The purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos of Amazon for $250 million is stunning news. Since Alexa.com , an Amazon service, ranks the global traffic at washingtonpost.com at an impressive global rank of 405, Bezos seems to have made a great move.With huge global traffic, the Washington post website has great prospects to reinvent digital news and associated advertising revenue.
As Raju Narisetti, former managing editor of the Washington Post explains in the video,the print edition is printed in just one location and distributed in only seven counties in the Washington DC area with a circulation in the mid 400.000's. According to different estimates, current daily web visitors at washingtonpost.com exceeds one million with over three million page views daily. Given that Jeff Bezos has been able to make Amazon and the online retail model
work, brings hope to the news industry. While the newsroom will not be
affected, Jeff Bezos should be able to "unchain the the digital
potential" of the newspaper from the legacy print operation according to
Narisetti.
Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, speaking at the Piers Morgan show on CNN tonight feels that Jeff Bezos should be able to invent a new business model for the Washington Post and the US news paper industry. A new business model must generate cash so that the "best obtainable version of the truth" is pursued by professional journalists.Without resources, newspapers are not able to cover the stories they'd like to cover , said Bernstein. This is true across smaller regional newspapers as well, just as a leading PR manager told this blog: "unless the story is really exciting, they (newspapers) can't cover it because there are no reporters." Without reporters and resources, news organizations are not able to work a nascent story in depth, because it does not have a "shocking" headline to start with. In fact, no resources means that too many stories are just not pursued that might eventually result in pathbreaking, world-changing, work.
Since much of the digital content produced and posted on the web depends on professional news reports online, its critical that Jeff Bezos and Amazon is able to re-invent the Washington Post and newspaper model for the digital age. There will be no shortage of news talent given that Communication is among the most popular majors in US colleges.Contact StratoServe.