"Bezos believes that a big reset button is being hit on the media ecosystem."

"And the old models don’t work. So there’s plenty of room and opportunity for new models to be created," says Businessweek senior writer Brad Stone, whose book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," coming out in October, needs updating.

We’re so dominated in our world by our media organizations getting smaller and losing money, and yet to him it’s always been clear that this is an opportunity for more experimentation. So this does fit within that framework.

But Stone thinks the acquisition might be less about the monetizing old media on the web and more about "buying a lot of political influence."

And we can’t discard the fact that Amazon hasn’t been an enormous player, at least up until the dispute over sales taxes, and in buying The Washington Post, he has a seat at the table. And I think particularly legislators and anti-trust regulators are gonna be weighing the dominance of Amazon a lot in the years ahead.

Here's Stone's book, which you can pre-order, obviously at Amazon, which happens to be the best way to monetize a blog, through its Associates program, which you know I participate in. (Feel free to enter Amazon through my portal if you're inclined to buy something and simultaneously express appreciation for my writing.)