Fortune magazine called Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, the ultimate disrupter when he was chosen as its 2012 Businessperson of the Year. Last week, Bezos bought The Washington Postnewspaper, a premier brand in the content world, for $250 million. In a memo to Post employees, Bezos wrote that he’s “excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.”
“The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs,” he wrote. “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy.”
Print newspaper is a dying media. So what could Bezos be thinking? Time magazine reporter David Von Drehle speculates that Bezos is “unlikely to spend precious time and capital on trying to re-create the old bundle in pixels while it clings to life in print. Instead, he is likely to look for ways to break it up and give people the content they value in whatever form they want it—for a price.”
Looks like Bezos is getting ready to shake up the newspaper industry! We’ll have to wait and see what opportunities will be opened up for content marketers.