SEPT 26- The man who just bought The Washington Post thinks newspapers will some day become a luxury item like horses.
Some day. I don’t know how many years in the future. It could be decades. But I think printed newspapers on actual paper maybe a luxury item. Sort of like people still have horses but it’s not their primary way of commuting to the office, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos told Today.com in an interview.
Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post, the famed American daily that broke the story of the Watergate scandal. The deal was announced last month.
Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, will become the sole owner of the Post and affiliated publications when the sale is completed.
Bezos’s reputation and smarts made him attractive as a buyer of The Post, said Katharine Weymouth Weymouth, Graham’s niece and the fourth generation of her family involved in the newspaper, who would stay on as publisher and CEO of the Post.
After the buyout, Bezos wrote in his memo to Post employees that the paper “will need to experiment” in the years to come, adding that he was “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.”
INDIA TODAY
