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h/t to @Frank_S_David for tweeting the link.

People have wondered and speculated and analyzed why exactly Jeff Bezos decided to buy the Washington Post.  Late last week Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post offered some clues.  He reported how Bezos, in remarks to the Post staff, described wanting to get back to “that glorious bundle that the paper did so well.”  What Bezos wants is to find a way to make the Post such a destination that people will choose to visit regularly and not just read individual articles but stay and scan through many, presumably in one sitting, as people used to do as their morning ritual.

Timothy Lee is skeptical and I’ll just briefly summarize his points and urge you to go read his great article for the details.  Lee points out that news distribution has become unbundled due to the influence of the internet.  (For some nice posts on the concept of unbundling see this one by Leigh Drogan and this one by Frank David).  People consume news in individual article-sized chunks, often following links provided by friends and colleagues and search engines, without much loyalty to specific outlets or writers.  Lee also points out that while the Post has excellent writers, they’re still a miniscule fraction of the writers on the internet and most of the best writers are not on the Post’s staff.  Lee uses this as a launching point to talk about the increasingly important skillset of attracting clicks, largely through evocative headlines.  You know, like the one I tried to write for this post.  Did it work?

Jeff Bezos’ ambition is quite interesting on a couple of different levels.  The first is the basic question of why Bezos thinks he can do this?

The answer, I believe, is that he already succeeded once.

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