Washington Post sale brings a true disruptor to the newspaper business

In my years discussing disruptive innovation while teaching Newspaper Next concepts, I often said that newspapers’ advertising/circulation blinders kept us from developing a digital marketplace such as Amazon.

Well, now, we finally have Amazon’s disruptive founder in the newspaper business, with the Washington Post’s announced sale to Jeff Bezos.

I don’t have time to analyze the deal today — and wouldn’t trust such swift analysis if I did — but I am glad to see such a disruptor coming to the newspaper business. I think we can count on the Post moving beyond the narrow advertising/subscriptions model that is collapsing.

To see Bezos bringing his disruptive approach to the newspaper of Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Dana Priest, Carol Guzy and Gene Weingarten is exciting and intriguing. I look forward to it in anticipation.

It’s not what Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan forecast in EPIC 2014, but that did forecast an amazing Amazon merger. So I’ll post it here as a reminder.

Disclosure: My wife, Mimi Johnson, published her novel, Gathering String, using Amazon’s self-publishing services.

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The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away

I got a chuckle (OK, and a bit of an ego boost) last week when a student blogger likened meeting me to meeting Brad Pitt. A louder chuckle (and not quite the ego boost) when I saw the photo accompanying a plug for my blog as one of the “experts” discussing the Boston Globe sale:

>@stevebuttry looks different from when we worked together: (from http://t.co/6FWZI3NkbF) pic.twitter.com/WJe1P6xdjr

— Andrew Beaujon (@abeaujon) August 5, 2013

Other experts cited are accompanied by their real photos. I recognized Alan Mutter and Ken Doctor right away and Google searches confirmed that Michael Scully and Howie Carr were the people pictured with their comments. Jim Dempsey, a former columnist for the Worcester Telegram, got a stack of newspapers for his illustration. I presume they chose to illustrate me with a photo of some guy reading the newspaper (and about the age of a typical newspaper reader, too). But I’m pretty easy to find in Google. Or you could email me and ask for a photo.

For the record, this is what I look like. And the blog is The Buttry Diary, not The Daily Buttry.

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