Free Kindles for every newspaper subscriber! Papers delivered by Amazon’s Kiva robots! Door desks in the newsroom!
Certainly Jeff Bezos will be more innovative than that, but the Amazon founder’s surprising deal to acquire the Washington Post leads to the inevitable question: What should he do with this old-fashioned newspaper anyway?
In his memo to Washington Post employees, Bezos professes not to have much of a plan yet. “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”
Brad Stone, who is set to publish a book about Amazon this fall, writes on Bloomberg Businessweek that the deal is unusual among Bezos’ investments, which include startups such as Uber and Makerbot. “Bezos believes that the Internet is changing the entire business landscape, but so far he has seemed devoted to blazing new paths, not rescuing ailing old media franchises,” he writes.
Here’s your chance to weigh in. What should Bezos do with the Washington Post?
And a bonus question, inspired by our parody above. What should the Post’s actual headline be tomorrow?
