Voices
story is instructive: Bezos persisted in pouring vast sums of money
into an unprofitable business,
ignoring the naysayers while staying focused on building something
of great value. By the late-1990s,
as Amazon was being written off
in many quarters as just another
dot-com that got too big too fast
and might well disappear, Bezos
openly scoffed at the notion of
pursuing quick profitability.
“To have thought otherwise
would have been management malpractice,” he later told Mark Leibovich, in another profile published
in — yes — the Washington Post.
“Profits,” as Leibovich explained,
“meant stinting on marketing, advertising and infrastructure.”
Bezos was in it for the long haul.
He would invest in his vision,
whatever Wall Street might say.
Now, there is no Wall Street.
The Washington Post is a private
company, to be run as its owner
sees fit.
Building the future of e-commerce is, of course, different
from taking over a legacy brand
in a declining industry. But the
essential similarities are worth
examining. Amazon was about
embracing the Web to forge a
more efficient way of distribut-
PETER S.
GOODMAN
ing a dusty old product, the book.
That’s basically what newspaper
publishers have been trying to
do since they figured out that the
Web was real and couldn’t simply
be ignored: use the Internet to replace newsprint while somehow
finding new revenues to replace
newspaper display advertising.
“What technology has taken
away, technology can return,” Bezos
declared in a speech at the PC Expo
trade show more than 13 years ago.
He was talking about how the Web,
far from simple threat to traditional retail, could revive shopping
with the customer in mind, personalizing the experience.
Those words might just as well
now be applied to the Washington Post. People like books, so
Amazon sold a lot of them. People
hunger for investigative reporting, news, storytelling and analysis. The Post is full of people who
excel at all of those pursuits. The
holy grail is figuring out how to
employ them and distribute their
work in new and profitable ways.
If there is a way, Jeff Bezos has a
better shot at finding it
than the next guy.
Peter S. Goodman is the executive
business editor of The Huffington Post.
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13