Jeffrey Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. He’s the CEO of Amazon and soon to be new owner of The Washington Post. We’re looking forward to see the changes he brings to the newspaper, aiming for what he calls a “golden era”.

The Washington Post has been under the control of Donald E. Graham’s family for over 80 years. They quietly put the business up for sale earlier this year stating that it needed an owner capable of making a sustained investment in it, and being one of the richest men on the planet, Jeff Bezos was the guy. He said,

It’s important for The Post not just to survive, but to grow. The product of The Post is still great. The piece that’s missing is that it’s a challenged business. No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.

Bezos also said that he has no immediate plans to change the newspaper but that it takes time and we can only expect to see changes in a couple of years,

In my experience, the way invention, innovation and change happen is [through] team effort. There’s no lone genius who figures it all out and sends down the magic formula. You study, you debate, you brainstorm and the answers start to emerge. It takes time. Nothing happens quickly in this mode. You develop theories and hypotheses, but you don’t know if readers will respond. You do as many experiments as rapidly as possible. ‘Quickly’ in my mind would be years.

The internet mogul may be a little responsible for a few newspapers and publishers going out of business due to the launch of Amazon’s kindle, but he says he has always had a “love affair” with “the printed word in all its forms.” Amazon used to be an online book retailer and now they publish their own books.

Bezos agrees that the news and the readers come before the money, saying that The Post has, “readers at its centerpiece. I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece. Whatever the mission is, it has news at its heart”

[Source : The Washington Post]