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Right after touching the screen and selecting Washington Post from
the bookmark menu, there it was, the surprising news of that day:
the Washington Post had been sold for $250 millions.
It was once said that the railroad tycoons went out of business
because they thought they were in the monopoly railway business, not
realizing that actually they were in the transportation business. It
is puzzling why so many traditional newspaper companies have not
been able to adapt to the simple change of platform from paper to electronic
devices. In the digital age of the Internet and the mobile devices,
potentially everyone could become a reader of Washington Post's
content. The readership is growing and it may grow exponentially. It
is the paper subscription that is shrinking. If a digital news site
is highly popular, it may not need subscriptions to grow the
business.
It
seems that Mr. Bezos made an incisive business decision to purchase
The Post. With the rather successful Kindle, the new owner of the
Washington Post probably thinks he can turn every Kindle owner into
a reader of The Post. Moreover, if Amazon can make Kindle the best mobile device
for reading the news, it may increase Kindle's market share
of the tablet users.
Two
trends are forming among the news consumers. First, the tablets are
becoming the platform for reading the news. Second, the smart phones
are becoming the mobile platform for watching the news. When there
are more competitions and less subscribers, raising the price for an
issue of the newspaper is not the answer; but many newspaper
companies did just that.
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