Bezos buys the WaPo
The MSM seems to be treating this as a very big story. I can’t imagine why, although for them I suppose it’s a sort of inside baseball. But I’ll provide this thread for those of you who want to talk about it.
To me it just seems like a guy with a ton of money bought a plaything to fool around with. The WaPo sold for $250 million, considerably more than its poor step-cousin the Boston Globe, but mere chump change to Bezos, whose net worth is 100 times that (estimate: $25 billion).
Bezos made his fortune by having a great idea, Amazon, and successfully developing it at just the right time. As for politics, he’s described as a libertarian, but has also donated much more money to Democrats than Republicans, so that sounds like a very odd sort of libertarianism to me. I have no expectations that the newspaper will change into something worth reading under his helm, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.
ADDENDUM: The name “Bezos,” combined with all that money, made me think of this:
And then, looking at the translation of the lyric from Spanish to English, there’s this. Had Ilsa been listening to “Besame Mucho” as well as “As Time Goes By”?
I don’t read the WaPo, but in principle, a newspaper’s owner shouldn’t be commited to anything other than truthful inquisitive journalism. If he stands for that much, its a victory. But if it’s already making a lot of money as it is, he probably won’t change much and risk losing subscriptions and advertisements.
If he goes further left or lets them pursue actuvist causes, I will just use Ebay all the time.
Which reminds me Neo- what about an Ebay button?
I saw an interesting thought that Bezo’s was buying political clout that would help him in the Amazon “sales tax” wars. Makes sense, he doesn’t have to attack people but can have favorable coverage go to supporters. He doesn’t want to be Wal-Mart in liberal politicians eyes, so WaPo fills the bill.
His primary ambit, Amazon, can get burned by association if Bezos pulls a Hearst.
As a fulcrum in DC, the Post is the acme.
BTW, Amazon is insanely overpriced as a security.
One is reminded of Netscape.
“The name “Bezos,” combined with all that money, made me think of this…”
Well, snap out of it!
WHACK!
Amazon gets its edge in convenience and the fact that it doesn’t pay sales taxes to a great majority of product sells.
Democrats, trying to find another cow to milk, seeks to get Amazon to pay sales taxes. In fact, they just won one suit over Amazon for a tune of several “retroactive” taxes.
It wouldn’t surprise me that the WaPo was bought to serve as a sort of business “propaganda machine”. After all, the Leftist propaganda machine got them TRILLIONS in redistributed “wealth”.
Ah, Besame Mucho. My Spanish 1-2 teacher played us several interpretations of this song, including one by The Ames Brothers. His playing Besame Mucho helped me connect written and spoken Spanish. One of my favorite songs.
For Bezos, the WaPo is pocket change. My immediate reaction is that the WaPo will not become more even-handed under his tutelage. Look at what the Facebook zillionare did with The New Republic. Seems to me that TNR is worse than ever.
We shall see.
This is way out of my area of expertise, but I’ve heard better informed people say that Bezos wants the Washington Post primarily as a platform or destination — electronic not paper.
The site will draw lots of visitors, but the content itself would be a loss-leader. Somehow he expects to make money on the site as gateway. Maybe he’ll try to compete with Google in the sale of web advertising? Maybe he can somehow use customer data accumulated by Amazon? It’s not private, after all. Anyway, Amazon has never made any money, so all he really needs to do is to convince investors that he has a big idea that will eventually make lots of money, and then Bezos gets richer. Amazon does provide a great service, but Bezos is essentially a flim-flam man.
Anyway, the idea is that this purchase has almost nothing to do with newspapers. This sounds plausible to me, but it’s not false modesty when I say I’m just passing on gossip.
Cornflour, sounds right. One question though. You say “It’s not private, after all.” You mean Amazon’s customer data? According to their privacy policy if they will give notice if they might share info with third parties and will give the customer an option not to share.
I thought this piece was pretty good on guessing Why? And this piece expands on the first, with more examples.
Hi Steve,
Amy links to a couple articles that are similar to my “gossip” comment. Still, I have to say that both articles are a bit vague on the issue of monetization.
As to the issue of privacy at Amazon, I’m not a lawyer, so please take the following as little more than speculation (aka bullsh**).
1. Policies can be changed.
2. Policies can be re-interpreted.
3. In a new technological environment, policies have to be re-interpreted.
4. Policies are not contracts.
5. In a new technological environment, even contracts can be re-interpreted.
6. User data can always be provided in aggregated form — e.g. by zip code or census block. Even an IP address can be considered an aggregation, since it isn’t necessarily tied to a single user.
7. When we shop at Amazon, we are already provided with suggestions for products. The suggestions are based on data they’ve collected about our browsing and shopping histories.
Having said all that, my comment “It’s not private, after all” was too loose, too careless even for a blog. My apologies.
Sorry, THIS is the “Besame Mucho” I like:
Just because it’s so unusual in terms of who it is singing it.
P.S., this is another related bootleg track that I’ve always loved, esp. since I think very highly of The Music Man…