Mr. Bezos, tear down that wall.

I don't think the ownership of the WaPo has exchanged hands yet, but my first thought on hearing the news that Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post is: He should take down the paywall. For about a day, I imagined that maybe he'd already made that happen. I was getting to lots of articles, but it turned out it was just close enough to the beginning of the month that I hadn't maxed out on the free access yet.

This morning, I'm trying to read "Jeff Bezos, The Post's incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon" and I have to hit the "reader" button to get to the text. Bezos needs to demand that the wall go. Having more readers is what really matters. Turning all that volume into money is something that can happen later. Isn't that how Amazon works? And anyway, Bezos already has so much money that he doesn't need to use WaPo to get more money. He needs it for his personal prestige and power. More readers suits that goal better than squeezing some money out of some of them.

Anyway, what is this "demanding style"? Paragraph 1 says he ends conversations that go on too long. Paragraph 2 says he has a "famously long-term approach." Interesting combination relating to time: patience in one sense and not in another. He's patient with the development of the product and the market, but wants efficiency internally. Paragraph 3 reinforces that point:

He favors a nimble, loosely organized company in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome. And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will most excite customers.

Put it in writing. Don't blather with me for an hour, when you can crystallize your thoughts through the writing process, and I can read it all in a minute.

Reading on, there's lots about efficiency. It's one thing to hate to waste any time — many of us identify with that. What's unusual is the willingness to impose rigorous efficiency on others, to decline the comforts of being nice to the people in your immediate environment, and to do it out of regard for the customers, the people out there, out of your sight.

How will this style apply to running the newspaper?

Bezos has said that he intends to keep his focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham family, have been.

Good. Be the outsider. Be in it for us, the readers, not to be a part of some sick insider culture.

Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.

Take away their crutches.

Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.

The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through.

So Bezos has been about writing. Writing, marketing, efficiency... Okay. Show us the newspaper.

And stop blocking the view. Tear down that wall.

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"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.)

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Bezos and the WaPo paywall.

"Last March, the Washington Post put up a metered paywall, charging readers who access more than 20 articles a month," but Jeff Bezos, who just bought WaPo, has said, "On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change." So what's going to happen?

While Bezos may not interfere with editorial, it is within his role as owner to see the paper to profitability. If Bezos thinks paywalls are misguided, we may see the Washington Post drop theirs.

Bezos did not think Kindle was the salvation of papers, since “the problem is that many readers still prefer the printed version.”...

Interestingly enough, Bezos says “We [Amazon] realized that people are willing to pay for newspaper subscriptions on tablets. In the near future, every household will have multiple tablets. That’s going to be the default and will provide momentum for newspapers, too,” so we may see some creative subscription models on the Kindle or bundled with other products.

Meanwhile, over at the NYT, where they're struggling to adapt to the web, there's this huge and immediately obsolete "Fashion & Style" piece from last Sunday — "The Next Edition: Katharine Weymouth Takes Charge at the Washington Post" — which is full of fashion inanity like this:

Ms. Weymouth’s penchant for showing off her athletic figure — she arrived for a photo shoot in a crisp white sleeveless sheath and four-inch lime green Jimmy Choos — provokes titters in the newsroom. Then again, she works hard for it; [Molly Elkin, Ms. Weymouth’s best friend] said the two spend Sunday mornings doing free weights and “boy push-ups” with a personal trainer.

But has some decent foreshadowing of what was about to happen:

Quick-witted and no-nonsense, Ms. Weymouth is more like her steely grandmother than her famously demanding and mercurial mother. But since becoming publisher in February 2008, she has had a rocky ride; she has already hired her second editor, and critics lament that she is presiding over a newspaper in retreat.

The NYT article on the Bezos deal — "A Mogul Gets a Landmark in the Capital" — doesn't mention Weymouth.

Mr. Bezos has indulged his passion for space by financing the recovery from the seabed of an Apollo rocket that carried the first men to the moon. He is paying for creation of a clock buried in a mountain in West Texas that will tick once a year for the next 10,000 years. And now, Mr. Bezos — a man known for being an unsentimental businessman — has invested squarely in a sentimental business steeped in tradition....

“It’s an old boring story — rich man buys a newspaper — but in this instance it’s one of the richest men ever buying one of the most important newspapers ever, which is the one our government leaders read first thing every morning,” said Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House, a well-regarded small publisher. “This is the capper in the development of one of the most powerful vertical monopolies in our history, which is also one of the most controlling in matters of cultural concern.”

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"The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos..."

"... ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations."

Wow! What an amazing moment of transition in media this is. The new overcomes the old. It's not Amazon that will own WaPo, but Bezos himself, individually.

I hope he gets rid of the paywall.

For much of the past decade... the paper has been unable to escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other “legacy” media organizations. The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies...

Bezos, in an interview, called The Post “an important institution” and expressed optimism about its future. “I don’t want to imply that I have a worked-out plan,” he said. “This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation.” He said, “There would be change with or without new ownership. But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

ADDED: It seems as though the Bezos idea should be to forget about making money — like Citizen Kane — and simply plunge into making a great newspaper. Bezos doesn't need to make money. He can be simply spending money. Do what is good! What else should he do at this point? And even when Amazon was being developed, the need to make money soon was considered a distraction, if I remember correctly. He had the nerve to put that off way into the future. Here's the "Citizen Kane" scene this makes me think of:



"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."

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I see that 4 readers bought "$64,000 Jazz"...

... the record I talked about in "Records From My Father, Part 6." I commend you! This was a great buy — 12 immensely enjoyable recordings, downloadable for a mere $7. It seems foolish not to buy it. I would pay $7 for Buck Clayton's "How Hi the Fi" alone. But thanks for buying it through the Althouse Amazon portal. And thanks to everyone who bought stuff using the Althouse Amazon portal. Even though it costs you nothing extra to buy things through that route, it works to give me the message that you like what I've been writing here, and that means a lot.

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Real Buffalo and Sweet Potato Dog Food.

That's one item from the things bought through my Amazon portal yesterday. (Thanks to all who show support for this blog shopping that way.) I like finding out about a category of product I would never have thought about, like super-specific dog food. The company that made the above-named product, Merrick, also makes Grammy's Pot Pie Dog Food, Real Duck and Green Pea Dog Food, Real Lamb Brown Rice and Apples Dog Food, Thanksgiving Day Dinner Dog Food (come on, aren't there always leftovers?!), Cowboy Cookout Dog Food, and Tripe & Liver Steak Patties for Dogs.



Alternatively, you can cook up your own pet food:

[Some lady's] standard recipe, which will feed Orion along with the other dog and the three cats in her house for around 10 days, calls for grinding 40 pounds of pasture-raised chicken necks with another 20 pounds of chicken giblets. To this, she adds five pounds of carrots, a whole cabbage and several other fruits, all from the organic fields of Midsummer Farm, [her] farm in Warwick, N.Y. Finally, she blends the mix with herbs and supplements.

And here's a less grandiose recipe. 

ADDED: A reader recommends the "recipes" at Raw Fed Dogs. Click links to laugh.

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Education and teacher supplies.

A nice selection at Amazon, where you can show your support for this blog.

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Dachshund food.

I had no idea there was breed-specific dog food. But Dachshund food was one of the items bought through the Althouse Amazon portal yesterday. Whatever you need to buy — on whatever level of specificity — you can choose to enter Amazon through that link and thereby bark, howl, and yap your appreciation for this blog, where there's always another biscuit.

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Continued carnage by pro executioners.

After yesterday's post about the The Executioner PRO Fly Swat Wasp Bug Mosquito Swatter Zapper, I see that 4 of you readers decided to step up and get your wasp-swatting done. And that's just those of you who bought your executioner's tools through the Althouse Amazon portal, where readers can shop and — in the muddled mind of Althouse — appear to be saying, we love you, even after you imposed the death sentence on the whole comments section in a draconian reaction to the infestation of wasps, mosquitoes, and bugs.

And if you'd like to add that you love my Lawnboy too, here's his recommended reel mower... and here's the fancy Fiskars mower he's contemplating. Meade assures me all the unusual looking parts are functional. It does have less of the classic look that's functional when your enterprise is making romanticized photographs.

"I remember my father's reel mower," I say. "It had a wooden handle."

Meade moves the headphones off his ears — he's listening to "Brokedown Palace" — and I repeat myself. He says: "Oh, yeah. I would love to have one of those."

Ebay? Nah. All the wooden-handled reel mowers seem to have the words "antique" and "vintage" attached to them, like you're just supposed to lean them up against the wall for decoration in your brokedown palace.

Fare you well, my honey, fare you well, my only true one.
All the birds that were singing are flown, except you alone.

Cue to my exiled commenters to say Althouse is mourning the loss of all the commenters.

Going to leave this brokedown palace,
On my hands and my knees, I will roll, roll, roll.
Make myself a bed by the waterside,
In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll.

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The Executioner PRO Fly Swat Wasp Bug Mosquito Swatter Zapper.

Is this a sport? Is it wrong?

Of all the things bought at Amazon through the Althouse Amazon Portal yesterday, that's the one that caught my eye... and kind of scared me.

Remember: When you swat at the wasp, you must kill him.

And: Thanks to all who do their shopping through the Althouse Amazon Portal. It feels like a vote of confidence in this blog and inspires me ever onward, swatting (if not executing) all manner of insectoid foolishness found on the web.

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"Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living."

Subtitle of "The Foxfire Book," which was published in 1972, collecting the best of Foxfire magazine (which was famous enough to make me forever incapable of remembering the name of one of my internet browsers, Firefox).

I'm noticing the book this morning because it's one of the things that readers of this blog bought using my portal to Amazon (which is always at the top of the blog, in the banner). Thanks to everyone who used the portal to buy whatever it is they'd have bought anyway and thereby making a contribution to this blog. Much as I write for the intrinsic rewards of writing — my old motto: "to live freely in writing" — I am a professional writer, the Amazon portal is the main way this blog is monetized, and seeing it work is an encouragement.

I know there are some people who would love to discourage me, but that's irrelevant. Those who buy nothing through the Amazon portal make no impression — whether they hate me or have never heard of me. Those who do buy are saying: I care about this blog, and I want it to continue to be there every day, as it has been for nearly 10 years (without a single missed day). I hear you.

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"A federal judge on Wednesday found that Apple violated antitrust law in helping raise the retail price of e-books..."

"... saying the company 'played a central role in facilitating and executing' a conspiracy with five big publishers."

Apple’s lawyers noted at the trial that the publishers had long complained that Amazon.com’s uniform pricing of $9.99 for new e-book titles was too low.... But the Justice Department said Apple’s deal with the publishers left Amazon with no choice but to raise prices....


The Justice Department said that the publishers used their relationship with Apple, combined with the most-favored nation clause, to threaten Amazon to switch to the agency model so they could raise prices. If Amazon did not agree to those terms, the government said, the publishers intended to withhold their e-books from the retailer until the more expensive hardcover books had been on the market for awhile....

One e-mail, written by Steven P. Jobs when he was chief executive of Apple, was frequently brought up at the trial. In an e-mail conversation with [Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services] about the contracts negotiated with the publishers, Mr. Jobs wrote: “I can live with this, as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don’t, I’m not sure we can be competitive.”

Good. Celebrate by buying a little something for yourself at Amazon. If you use that link, you'll be supporting this blog (without paying any extra for anything).

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