THE NEW YORKER: …If [Jeff] Bezos’s motives are essentially philanthropic, why isn’t he purchasing the paper through his family foundation, which could probably afford it, especially if he kicked it some more of his estimated twenty-five billion dollars? At the moment, the family foundation, which is run by Bezos’s parents, Jackie and Mike, focusses on preschool and K-12 education. But there’s nothing to stop it from adding saving newspapers that educate the public to its list of aims. For years now, some knowledgeable media people have thought that the only long-term solution for America’s serious newspapers, which do costly, serious journalism, is to have their ultimate owners be charitable trusts, which is how the Guardian was structured until recently.
Evidently, Bezos isn’t taking this route, which leaves two possibilities, not mutually exclusive. The first is he intends to return the Post to its former role as a profitable business, a project with which I wish him good luck. It is surely fanciful to suggest that Bezos, simply because of his experience at Amazon, will immediately come up with a fresh digital strategy to save the Post. If such a wheeze were readily available, somebody at a newspaper company would have thought of it. To be sure, the Post, like most newspapers, was slow to realize the full scale of the threat that it faced from online competitors. In recent years, though, it has invested in the Web, developing some popular and high-quality online products, such as Wonkblog and The Fix. But, so far, this push hasn’t much helped the paper’s bottom line. In the first half of this year, the Post lost about fifty million dollars, after accounting for pension costs.
The second possibility is that Bezos is buying the Post for political reasons, a theory for which I have no evidence, except that it is neither outlandish nor ahistorical. It is a reason that people buy newspapers. On a personal level, Bezos is a socially progressive libertarian—a fairly common crossbreed in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the two arenas where he has spent his business career. Last year, he and his wife pledged $2.5 million to support gay marriage in a Washington State referendum, and the measure passed handily. Over the years, he has contributed modestly to candidates of both major parties, and, as David Remnick notes, to the nonprofit 501(c)(3) entity that owns the libertarian magazine Reason… (more)
