This fall will mark the third anniversary of the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It's a good time to take stock: Have Bezos's improvements at the paper been primarily driven by the money he's brought in? Or is he doing things in a fundamentally different way that even career media people can learn from?
"There are areas — some specific, some more attitudinal — from which newspapers could in fact benefit by studying the Bezos model," writes Northeastern University media professor Dan Kennedy. Among them: the significant benefits to private ownership; the Post was a publicly traded company prior to the Bezos takeover. Courtesy the Neiman Lab.