The Amazon effect at Washington Post

Do you remember where you were when you heard that Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post?
Okay, that’s a bit too dramatic. But: Do you remember how surprised you were when you heard that Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post?
Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family a little more than two years ago, and when the news traveled across the news world, the anticipation hung in the air: WWJD? Could the Amazon wunderkind do for news publishing what he had done for retail commerce, imagining a whole new business model that could sustain a large-scale enterprise?
Even as the wider legacy news industry keeps its ears to the ground, hoping for turnaround ideas, we’ve heard no earth-shattering announcements out of D.C. But Bezosian clues do tumble out now and then — more frequently of late. There’s the Washington Post national network, now comprising some 300 dailies, in which the Post offers local newspapers’ subscribers free access to the national edition of the Post. Then there’s the long-awaited Prime partnership, by which Amazon’s 40 million or more Prime subscribers can get Post national for free for six months, and only $48 a year thereafter (“Jeff Bezos (finally) pumps up the Post with Prime”).
Now comes what could become another fulcrum of a Post national play: Arc. If Jeff Bezos has provided runway for the rebuilding of the Post franchise, think about Arc as the new control tower, a to-be-licensed platform built to support modern digital publishing.
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