Jeff Bezos this week interrupted a holiday in Mykonos, Greece on his $500mn yacht Koru with his fiancée Lauren Sánchez to reassure the agitated journalists of the lossmaking Washington Post. “I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” wrote Amazon’s founder.
The figure to whom he lent his backing after days of internal turmoil was Sir Will Lewis, a former FT journalist and editor of The Daily Telegraph. Lewis’s stewardship of the news publication that Bezos acquired for half the price of his yacht in 2013 is under intense scrutiny. But the memo had a sting: “The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business.”
Bezos’s brilliance in disrupting industries since he founded Amazon 30 years ago this July has made him a $204bn fortune and enabled him to build his Blue Origin space venture. But the US news business, with its proud cadre of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists striving to honour their traditional mission amid the onslaught of digital information, has been tough to transform.