Hopefully this means that their new paywall will be included in every Prime membership.
Bezos will own the Post; Amazon won’t be involved.
1-Click Paywall, you mean.
Amazon won’t be involved, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see red-vs-blue op-eds mysteriously replaced by exciting discussions of the need to maintain the status quo on interstate commerce regulation and value-added taxation.
This is a pretty great hobby. He can meet with the other antique collectors and talk about when his purchase worked properly.
Sucker…
Brings to mind the time when google were considering buying up newspapers, to incoporate into their online business. I think this acquisition will be integrated into Amazon, and will be followed by a flurry of purchases by Amazon, Google, Apple, etc.
Why am I thinking of William Randolph Hearst?
The new media is eating up the old media… or something.
Once one tires of buying yachts one moves on to rockets and then newspapers.
Let’s hope this is a shrewd business move and not an effort to buy a platform to shout from. At least he isn’t the Koch Brothers.
I’m not sure I agree that the Washington Post, and any of other great newspapers, are as antiquated as you think. For one thing, the entire political class reads these papers, especially the Washington Post and the New York Times. That’s a hell of an influence to have…
At least the Koch brothers didn’t get it…
this is definitely the big plus in this story. i’d much rather bezos have it than the koch bros.
The Post works perfectly; its mission is to be the mouthpiece of the administration.
I don’t care how many times he says Amazon technically isn’t involved. Someone that just closed a deal for $800 million to have his company host CIA servers shouldn’t own newspapers.
Speaking of antiquated things…
So is this a better/worse deal than John W Henry, owner of the Red Sox, got when he bought the Boston Globe from the NYT for 70 million about a week ago? (discounted from the, I think 1.3 billion dollars that the New York Times group paid for it about twenty years ago)
At the end of the day, is there really a difference? Sure, the Koch brothers suck and have entrenched corporate interests to defend, and they get the Tea Party crowd all riled up to do it by appealing to social issues. And Bezos is some humanitarian in comparison? He has his own entrenched economic interests to defend. Dude is just as much an elite as the Kochs and I doubt he has the interests of the American people at heart.
The Post lost 22 million dollars last year. Bezos expects to lose 22 million dollars this year. He expects to lose 22 million dollars next year.
You know, at that rate, he’ll have to close the place… in twelve hundred years.
