Jeff Bezos: It Will Take Years to Fix 'The Washington Post'

In his first interview since announcing his plans to buy The Washington Post for $250 million, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos cautioned that he had no quick fixes â€" just a "point of view" that might help the newspaper evolve its business model.

Bezos, who gave the interview to The Post (who else?), is planning to meet with the paper's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, among other execs. In the interview, Bezos portrayed himself as sort of an advisor to the paper and will keep his "day job" at Amazon and stay rooted in Seattle.

Bezos continually downplayed his individual influence on the paper. “If we figure out a new golden era at The Post . . . that will be due to the ingenuity and inventiveness and experimentation of the team at The Post,” he said. “I’ll be there with advice from a distance. If we solve that problem, I won’t deserve credit for it.”

Bezos also praised Post Chairman and CEO Donald Graham for setting realistic expectations:

Don was helpful in interviews [following the purchase] when he said, "Mr. Bezos is a businessman, not a magician." I thanked him for that afterwards. 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.”

According to Bezos, one of the newspaper's biggest problems is competition on the web, where a scoop can be quickly replicated by competitors, minimizing its impact:

The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of Web sites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can’t, it’s difficult to put the right resources behind it. . . . Even behind a paywall [digital subscription], Web sites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free' from another site?

As he admitted, Bezos has no immediate answer to the conundrum.

Image: Getty, Kevork Djansezian