Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post promises not just an ownership change for the 135-year-old institution but a potential transformation of the fusty mechanics of the newspaper business.
It remains to be seen whether the experiences of an Internet behemoth can be successfully applied to a legacy newspaper — and whether Amazon-style customer targeting would be palatable at a news organization.
But if Bezos applies the kind of innovations to the Post that have propelled Amazon under his stewardship, he could radically up-end traditional assumptions about how the paper delivers its journalism, generates ad revenue and interacts with its readers.