Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a bold move by Bezos. One of the interesting data points in the world of Journalism has been the transition of the New York Time from mostly paper to being mostly digital. Something Jeff is profoundly aware of.

Every morning while I eat my breakfast I download the Wall Street Journal and times to my iPad, and on the train to work scan them and this weeks Economist for interesting stories of the day, combined with this month's Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Science News.

If I could use Evernote with those "publications" on the iPad I could be very efficient in my collection of various inputs on news of the day. For now, I'm constrained to making notes to myself in my notebook.

To pull an interesting analogy here, Google sees everything through the lens of "You will be connected 100% of the time to the network." which is their future point that they are building systems around, sometimes today they seem ungainly or even useless when no network is available. Jeff (and Amazon) seems to see everything through the lens of "You will consume all of your media on a tablet like device." and building around the complete media experience there.

I think it is a run-of-the-mill acquisition of power by a member of the super rich.

How much is it worth to have the WaPo as a mouthpiece?

It's $250mm for the WaPo brand. Empowering the ordinary citizen to contribute to the global pool of community information is the future. Blogging was the first attempt in this direction, but it has failed because the distributed nature of blogs doesn't support content discovery.

As far as I'm concerned, AMZN already has plenty of brand recognition to talk about any technological innovation they might integrate with the WaPo brand. I look forward to AMZN playing its cards in the space and seeing if they can compete against a truly focused and unencumbered competitor.

Production is easy, discovery and profitability are the problems.

Best wishes, Bezos!

"Production is easy, discovery and profitability are the problems."

I agree, and that is what makes this so interesting. Lets say you had a 'kindle store' like thing but it was "News for You", and it had a search box kind of like a search engine box, but you could pull up your Kindle, any time something was happening, and type "Boston Bombing" into the search box, And poof you'd get all the stories about the Boston Bombing available to read after downloading them over the cellular network. Can you buy "inches of news" like you buy cellular minutes? With a roll over plan?

There are some tremendously disruptive businesses here.

Or maybe a news platform that passively ranked community-generated content geospatially. Already built and innovating on the core platform...

:)

The article mentions that this is a Bezos-only deal, no Amazon involvement.

Come now, certainly you don't believe that. Capital structure is an integral piece of corporate strategy as is board construction.

Bezos has liquidated so much AMZN stock he doesn't need AMZN's balance sheet for a piddly $250mm transaction. He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit. The last I checked, AMZN still had an infinite PE.

By keeping WaPo remote he can at least create the appearance that AMZN is corporately neutral for whatever news platform ideas AMZN pursues.

> He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit.

You mean like the $645MM profit they made in 2008, the $902MM profit they made in 2009, the $1.15BN profit in 2010, or $631MM profit in 2011?

Or is all that nullified by the $39MM loss in 2012 (due to LivingSocial)?

considering they have a market cap of 137 billion, those are really tiny profits. Obviously the strategy at Amazon is to grow revenues and invest in the business, but that doesn't mean the parent is wrong. Amazon has essentially had no profit to speak of compared with their market cap over their entire company life. People investing in them have done so under the hope/expectation that once they reach their goal of ??? (world domination maybe?) the profits will be really big. That or they are just hoping a greater fool will buy their shares higher at some point in the future.

There was a very interessting article once (shame on me that I didn't bookmark it...) comparing the strategy of Apple and Amazon. Main point was that Amazon pursues a low (zero?) margin strategy.

Guess that's what commerce should be about, cash instead of margin. Aldi, a pretty big german discounter of grocceries, works that way and became huge. That they are loosing right now against "new" entrants is a different thing.

But having seen time and again profitable companies struggle in time of crisis simply because they run out of cash, I'd rather back a company like Amazon.

Was this the article that you were talking about?

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins

Yes, exactly that one! Thanks!

Growth is all that typically matters in the stock market. Investors really want to see this kind of steady increase in stock price, despite the difficult economic environment.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=A...

Unless you have some blue chip giving out dividends, no one cares much about profit.

Given how little tax they pay in the UK, I'm surprised it's not higher.

This "amazon can't turn a profit" meme needs to die. They take in a ton of money. Just because they immediately turn around and spend it on the next cool project they've got happening doesnt mean they are a failing business. If their goal was to make the balance sheet look pretty, they could stop funding the production of original content for a couple of quarters, or stop investing in robotic fulfillment centres, or whatever else they are spending millions on. It would look like a profit then, but where's the fun in that?

Profit is for suckers. They focus on free cash flow.

Edit: Link: http://daslee.me/reading-jeff-bezos

I'm not saying there will never be any tie-in, but it's perfectly reasonable to expect that AMZN <> WAPO will be similar to Apple <> Pixar when Steve Jobs owned both. Some tie-ins for those who know, but not some massive concerted effort as you implied.

Journalistic institutions, in an effort to inform the masses, perform three critical functions: 1. Production of information, 2. Curation of information 3. Verification of information. A more colloquial way to say that might be "creation, curation, and fact-checking."

So far the creation aspect is almost entirely dominated by ordinary citizens. With nearly everyone carrying internet-connected devices for photo, video and text input, there's simply no way a news organization, no matter how large or well funded, can keep up.

Where "News" is still lacking now has more to do with the latter two points. The best content is invariably on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Vine, etc. but finding that needle in the haystack that is a news event is borderline impossible for the "ordinary citizen." Even the major news organizations are largely poring over the data that comes in and trying to find the best stuff. The third part - the fact checking- not many have time for anymore. The world moves so quickly that verifying accuracy is much less beneficial than seeking the next scoop. News orgs can move fast, make mistakes, and issue retractions later if they were wrong. Or they can just say "we're getting reports that..." (Translation: "We're watching Twitter and people are saying...")

I truly believe that creating a system that allows ordinary citizens to curate (vote on) and fact check the firehose of information flowing through social media networks is the bright, sustainable, profitable (!) future of journalism.

Full disclosure: I've been building and testing a product for a year that does precisely that, so I'm a little bit biased.

That product sounds interesting! Let us (or at least me) know when it begins to come available!

http://grasswire.com should be launching in a few weeks, just have to tie a few loose ends together.

Mmmmmm, grass!

Grassroots + newswire = grasswire

I think that is what http://www.newsvine.com/ set out to be in the beginning - the curation and verification of submitted content - I haven't thought about it in years though and a quick look at the home page shows that it still isn't very popular and seems pretty partisan.

But I agree, finding a way to crowdsource all three points of journalism without it becoming a mob (see reddit after the boston bombing) sounds like exactly the sort of newsource I would be interested in.

Eh, kinda. Newsvine was a mix of syndicated news and user-produced articles (think bleacher report for news without paying the writers). It went to hell when MSNBC.com bought it in 2007.

The problem with Reddit is upvotes encourage sensationalism (that's what Reddit is, after all), but there's no feature to reign it in or induce some sanity. That's why having a fact check built in is critical.

I can't imagine what Reddit would look like with fact checking. Redditors would not be happy if a popular story drops off the front page because someone deemed in inaccurate. How would the incentive structure work?

Reddit was built with a different purpose in mind. People just use it because its the closest thing you have to what should exist

Some of the serious communities (like AskHistorians) have very active and by-the-books moderators who foster really solid content. A reddit/sub-reddit structure with strong editors and encouragement could be useful in the news space.

Journalistic institutions, in an effort to inform the masses

In my opinion this is very shortsighted and arguably the most commonly misconceived part of "today's" journalism. "Journalistic institutions" are commonly referred to in business as Publishers. Publishing has one very specific goal, just like any other business that exists, which is simply to make money.

I truly believe that creating a system that allows ordinary citizens to curate (vote on) and fact check the firehose of information flowing through social media networks is the bright, sustainable, profitable (!) future of journalism.

I agree. The problem is that this effort should not be monetized, or at least it should be monetized in a way that doesn't bias and obfuscated the proper dissemination of information. I can't grok a single possible way of this concept to exist in harmony. Good on you (and your team?) to try to tackle this.

> So far the creation aspect is almost entirely dominated by ordinary citizens.

Not true at all. The in depth long-form journalism that e.g. Matt Taibi does at Rolling Stone http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog cannot be done by people who have day jobs with smartphone on a street corner. And it's thousands of times more valuable than the "man bites dog" type of stories that Joe Smartphone can capture.

Indeed! I have some journalist friends who, as a group, spent months just to write one piece of investigative journalism.

Another journalist friend once managed to work on something like that on his own, but only through crowdfunding.

Good journalism is expensive!

Ah yes, "investigative journalism", or as I like to think of it, "journalism". Not just reporting.

Indeed! I did a minor in journalism in the hopes of perhaps going in that direction professionally, only to realize that my idea of journalism was nothing like reality.

We spent a significant portion of the classes just learning how to write news items. The teacher then told us that what we were doing one day a week for six months is what full-time journalism students spend an entire year doing, and that this is much of what they'll be doing once they enter the job market.

She specifically advised those of us interested in being journalists to just get really good in our academic field, and move into journalism as 'specialists' from there.

Can this be scaled? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/23520052/the-big-roundta...

Maybe. Is it the same thing though? Or even close enough? It doesn't seem so to me.

I don't know how to fix news. But like you said, Starbucks Steve and his buddies probably aren't the answer. Maybe they need to work together with journalists.

If that's the case, why does the name change? IMHO that was in order for the old ownership to provide some dignity to the old Post (which broke many world-wide level news over the years, i.e. Watergate) from thew new ownership, in case J. Bezos turns the venerated newspaper into a trash magazine.

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