Hah! Good point.

[randomness]

Joseph Cotterill, posting in the FT Alphaville blog yesterday:

Jeff Bezos knows all about running a business with low margins, where booming profits are merely a distant goal, and where building market share is the reigning, but quite easily forgotten, task.

Today he bought a newspaper.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I expect the Post's [corrected] unions are going to have a rough ride of it...

[drwex]

I remember in the early days of Amazon when it appeared they were "giving away dollar bills for 95 cents." Bezos came to MIT to talk about his vision and was - well, not mocked per se but he didn't convince a lot of people. From this experience I have learned not to underestimate the man.

That said, he would be far from the first person to buy a newspaper as a vanity project and not give two figs for profit. I haven't looked at the Post's financials, but a lot of newspapers that are painted as 'struggling' now are in fact stable or even minimally profitable. They just don't have the high returns or growth potential that Wall St investors want to see, so they get dinged a lot. I can easily see the Post surviving as a quality institution that more or less breaks even for many years.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I can easily see the Post surviving as a quality institution that more or less breaks even for many years.

It might return to what newspapers, publishers, and other cultural businesses were during the mid-1900s, businesses that gave their owners tremendous prestige but meager profits. I'm sure there are cocktail parties that the publisher of the Washington Post is invited to that the CEO of the 49th company on the Fortune 500 is not.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Here's Megan McArdle's take on that: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/can-bezos-save-the-washington-post-from-print-s-dismal-economics-.html

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Jeff Bezos is much, much smaller than I expected.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

*snerk*