Voices
nopoly winnings into public goods
like concert halls and universities.
Perhaps this is “the beginning of
a phase in which this Gilded Age’s
major beneficiaries re-invest in the
infrastructure of our public intelligence,” suggested James Fallows.
That would be wonderful. Yet
maybe the deal signifies something
much simpler and more hopeful for
the state of American journalism:
Perhaps Bezos thinks he can make
money by producing and distributing consequential work.
As Bezos launched Amazon in
the mid-1990s and then forged it
into a colossus, he and his partners delighted in turning conventional wisdom on its head. The
Web, it was said, was destined to
destroy book publishing. All the
words would live in what we now
call the cloud. Anyone with connectivity would become their own
publisher, bringing down those
elitist institutions that had long
exacted their rents by maintaining their status as gatekeepers to
literary taste. The owners of the
presses would see their monopolistic grip eroded by the Internet
— the same sort of meritocratic
celebration that has more recently
formed the corpus of obituaries
for great print newspapers.
PETER S.
GOODMAN
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
Yet in one of the delicious ironies
of the dawn of the Web, Bezos and
Amazon proved that the same technology that was supposed to undermine text on the page and eviscerate its business model could in fact
be harnessed to sell more books
than ever. Maybe he thinks he can
duplicate the trick by retooling another supposed casualty of the Web
— serious-minded journalism.
It’s worth bearing in mind that
Bezos never accepted the charge
often thrown at his enterprise:
... the Washington Post ...
is now owned by someone with
a demonstrated track record
of harnessing the Internet to
rejuvenate something already
established and meaningful.”
that Amazon was basically just
another Walmart built on fiber
optics instead of bricks and mortar. His didn’t aim to become
merely a faceless purveyor of commodity goods that would undercut
the local merchant on price alone.
He described his mission as one
of erecting an updated, more sophisticated shopping experience.
He would use the technological