Jeff Bezos: We
need to takeThe Washington Post from being a great
local paper, which was a very successful strategy for decades, and
transform it into a great national and global paper. We have the
capability to do that, and as we do that we’re going to change the
revenue structure. We’ve historically made
a relatively large amount of money per reader on a relatively small
number of readers. We need instead to make a relatively small
amount of money per reader on a much larger number of readers. If
you are studying the news business, the Internet has been a
disaster for traditional news companies for the most part, because
it takes a lot of things away. There are a lot of anti-gifts the
Internet brought to the traditional news business. But it does
bring one huge gift. You have to maximize your usage of that new
gift, which is that it provides almost free global distribution. We
could have hundreds of millions of readers and make very little
money and have an amazing institution. And I’m happy to fund that
until we get there.
Note: For this week’s show, I am bringing you extensive
excerpts from a Jeff Bezos interview conducted by Martin Baron,
executive editor of The Washington Post, on May 18,
2016 at an event named Transformers.
I have interspersed the clips with my comments on the interview,
which I thought was extremely well done and revealing. Here
are some links to coverage of the interview.