File on media moguls

stop at 15:40

Script - Jeff Bezos at the Economic Club of Washington, CCNBC, 13th September 2018

Interviewer : Speaking of Washington, you bought a few years ago, as you mentioned, the Washington Post. Why did you buy the Washington Post ? You had no background in that area, what convinced you to do that ?

Jeff Bezos : Okay, first of all, I was not looking for a newspaper. I had no intention of buying newspaper, I had never thought about it, the idea had never occurred to me. It was never something, it wasn’t like a childhood dream, no, nothing. And my friend Don Graham, who at that time I had known 15 years, I’ve known him 20 years now. He approached me through an intermediary and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying the Washington Post. And I sent back word that I would not, because I didn’t really know anything about newspapers. And Don, over a series of conversations, convinced me that was unimportant, because we had, inside the Washington Post we have so much talent that understands newspapers, that wasn’t what the problem was. But what they needed was somebody who had an understanding of the Internet and so that was the first thing. That’s kind of how it got started and then I so I did some soul-searching and again my decision-making process something this would definitely be intuition and not analysis.

The financial situation of the Washington Post at that time, this was 2013, was very upside down and it’s a fixed cost business. And they had lost a loss of revenue over the previous five or six years, not through any fault of the people working there, or of the leadership team ; all of the paper had been managed very very well. The problem was a secular one : the internet was just eroding all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers had. All of them. I mean, that was just taking away every gift that the local newspaper had was kind of systematically removed by the internet. And so that’s why you see this it’s a profound problem across local newspapers all around the country. And in fact the world and so I had to do some soul-searching and I said you know ‘Is this something I want to get involved in ?’ ‘if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna put some heart into it and some work into it’, and I decided I would only do that if I really believed it was an important institution.

And I said to myself if this were a financially upside-down salty snack food company, the answer would be ‘no’. And but it was.. as soon as I started thinking about it that way, I was like “This is an important institution !’ It’s really. It is the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy. There’ was just no doubt in my mind about that.