Jeff Bezos is renowned for his patient, long-term approach to investment and willingness to lose money and be “misunderstood” for years. He has used it to invent new technology businesses that have won widespread admiration, even though their profitability remains meagre. He has never used it to save a struggling old one.
杰夫·贝佐斯(Jeff Bezos)以耐心的长线投资风格以及愿意接受多年亏损和“被人误解”而闻名。他以这种风格创立了几家广受敬佩的新技术企业——即便这些企业的盈利能力仍比较薄弱。不过，他从未把这种投资风格用于拯救一家深陷困境的老企业。
But that is the task he’s taken on by buying the Washington Post . “Really?” said one shocked former Amazon executive when told about the $250m deal on Monday. “My initial reaction is: that’s weird.”
而这就是他收购《华盛顿邮报》所面临的任务。一位亚马逊(Amazon)前高管得知周一达成的2.5亿美元交易时表示：“真的么？我的第一反应是：这太奇怪了。”
Mr Bezos is buying the Post via one of his own investment vehicles, not through Amazon, a structure that has raised questions about whether the deal is about a hobby, civic-mindedness, a desire to shape public opinion, or a hard-nosed business bet.
贝佐斯是通过自己的投资工具之一（而不是亚马逊）收购《华盛顿邮报》的。这种交易方式在人们心中划出了一个问号：这笔交易是出于爱好，出于公德心，出于想要左右公共观念的欲望，还是出于铁石心肠的商业盘算？
Don Graham, the chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, highlighted Mr Bezos’s long-term approach as one attribute that made him a “uniquely good new owner” for the Post. His deep pockets and lack of interest in posting steady profit growth to please Wall Street place him in the tradition of many of the newspaper barons of old.
华盛顿邮报公司(Washington Post Company)董事长兼首席执行官唐纳德·格雷厄姆(Donald Graham)强调，贝佐斯的长线投资风格是使他成为《华盛顿邮报》“独一无二的优秀新主人”的因素之一。他在财务上底气十足，而且向来无意为取悦华尔街而发布盈利稳定增长的财报，这与昔日许多老派报业大亨的传统不谋而合。
But it is Mr Bezos’s technology “genius” – that is what Mr Graham called it – which holds the most promise for the Post. What Mr Bezos has done in 18-years at Amazon, a business that now spans book publishing, fashion retail, warehousing, cloud computing and television production, points to five ways in which he could use his expertise to shake up the Post.
不过，对《华盛顿邮报》来说，贝佐斯所带来的最大希望是格雷厄姆所称的技术“天才”。他在亚马逊的18年苦心经营——如今，亚马逊的业务涵盖书籍出版、时装零售、仓储、云计算和电视制作——显示，他可能以五种方式运用自己的诀窍来重整《华盛顿邮报》。
The first is mining gigabytes of digital information about customers’ habits and preferences – the fabled troves of “big data” – to give them exactly what they want. It is what Amazon does with its “we have recommendations for you” emails and in his letter to Post staff on Monday, Mr Bezos said: “Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there.”
首先是挖掘关于顾客习惯与偏好的海量数字化信息（也就是当今看好的“大数据”宝库），准确给予顾客他们真正想要的东西。这正是亚马逊在“向您推荐”的电子邮件中所做的。在周一发给《华盛顿邮报》员工的信件中，贝佐斯表示：“读者将是我们的试金石，我们要理解他们关心什么：政府、地方官、饭店开张、童子军、企业、慈善机构、州长，或是体育，然后从这些理解出发展开工作。”
But it is debatable whether that would improve the quality of the Washington Post, or help make it more profitable. A crucial part of the print reading experience is the serendipitous discovery of stories, and too much personalisation could lock readers into an echo chamber.
不过，这么做能否提升《华盛顿邮报》的品质，或者是否有助于该报盈利，仍有待商榷。印刷品阅读体验的一个关键部分，就是在不经意间发现有意思的报道，太多个性化处理可能把读者锁进一个回音壁。
A second and related area where Mr Bezos could make a difference is on reading platforms, by changing the way news is presented just as he changed books by launching the Kindle ereader in 2007. It would not have to involve new hardware. What matters is the customer experience, says Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell. “He’s built [Amazon] on the best customer experience on the internet. How do you bring an Amazon-like customer experience to reading the news on an iPad, on an Android phone?”
贝佐斯能带来变化的第二个相关领域是阅读平台，他可以像2007年发布Kindle电子阅读器改变书籍那样，改变新闻的展示方式。这个过程可能都不必发布新硬件。Outsell分析师肯·多克托(Ken Doctor)表示，重要的是客户体验。“他凭借互联网上的最佳客户体验成功打造了（亚马逊）。如何为使用iPad或者Android手机阅读新闻的读者带来类似于亚马逊的客户体验呢？”
There is still ample scope for a new way to deliver news through a single interface, says Mr Doctor. “What Amazon has done for commerce, and what Apple did for music with iTunes, no one has ever done for news. Jeff Bezos, through the lens of Amazon thinking, has the ability to do that.”
多克托表示，通过单一界面以新的方式发布新闻仍有很大的腾挪空间。“亚马逊对商业造成的影响和苹果(Apple)用iTunes对音乐造成的影响，还没人在新闻领域实现过。透过亚马逊的思维棱镜，杰夫·贝佐斯有能力做到这一点。”
Mr Graham said the Post’s in-house innovations, such as its iPad app, had added to its readership, but not enough. In a 2012 annual report he highlighted a Washington Post Social Reader on Facebook, downloaded by more than 30m people, that was “all but gone” a year later.
格雷厄姆表示，类似iPad应用这样的内部创新，已经增加了《华盛顿邮报》的读者人数，不过仍然不够。在2012年年报中，他特别提到在Facebook上发布的《华盛顿邮报》社交网络阅读器(Washington Post Social Reader)，该阅读器下载量逾3000万，然而一年后用户“几乎全部消失”。
Closer to the news desks, Mr Bezos’s third contribution could be his own ideas about journalism. “Jeff is very much a student of the news and he reads journalists very carefully and critically and thoughtfully,” another ex-Amazon employee says.
接近新闻编辑部后，贝佐斯的第三个贡献可能是他自己对于新闻业的看法。另一位亚马逊前员工表示：“杰夫从新闻中学到了很多，他非常仔细、严谨而有洞察力地研读新闻从业人员写的东西。”
Mr Bezos has democratised book production with Amazon’s self-publishing programme, and he has sought to create a new niche for short-form titles with $2 Kindle Singles, which occupy a middle ground between magazine articles of no more than 5,000 words and books at over 30,000. Last week Amazon published a Kindle Singles interview with President Barack Obama.
贝佐斯通过亚马逊的自出版程序，令图书出版变得大众化，而他通过价格2美元的Kindle单文本(Kindle Single)为短篇题材创建了新的小众市场，Kindle单文本填补了不超过5000单词的杂志文章和3万单词以上的书本之间的空白地带。上周，亚马逊发表了对巴拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)总统的Kindle单文本版的访谈录。
Advertising is a fourth area where Mr Bezos brings expertise to the Post, whose print advertising revenues fell 14 per cent to $228m last year. Digital platforms led by Google and Facebook are increasingly important to advertisers, but Mr Bezos is trying to muscle in on this territory too.
广告是第四个贝佐斯能为《华盛顿邮报》带来的专长，去年该报的印刷广告收入下跌了14%，跌至2.28亿美元。对广告商来说，以谷歌(Google)和Facebook为首的数字化平台越来越重要，不过贝佐斯也在试图挤入这一领域。
Again by tapping into its trove of consumer data, Amazon sells advertising slots on its own sites and Kindle devices, as well as a network of other websites. Amazon’s worldwide advertising revenues will rise by 37 per cent this year to $835m, estimates eMarketer, a research group.
为此亚马逊再次发掘利用了其消费数据宝库，向广告商出售该公司网站、Kindle设备以及由其他网站组成的网络上的广告位置。研究公司eMarketer估计，今年亚马逊在全世界广告收入将增加37%，达到8.35亿美元。
The newspaper has already done a lot to adjust to the growth of online. But Mr Graham is frank about the challenges: “Faced with the loss of much of our classified advertising, the nationalisation of local retail and declining readership among younger people, we don’t have a formula for enduring profitability,” he says.
《华盛顿邮报》为适应互联网的发展已做过许多努力。不过格雷厄姆对于面临的挑战直言不讳，他表示：“如今，面临着分类广告的大量流失、地方零售业的全国化以及年轻人群中读者人数的下滑，我们没有能确保持续盈利的现成配方。”
A fifth Amazon specialism that could prove relevant is the way it bundles media products together to increase the overall appeal of Amazon’s services. Amazon has, for example, already spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring rights to films and television shows that it streams for free to Prime subscribers as an added incentive.
第五个可能有用的亚马逊专长，是其通过捆绑媒体产品来提升亚马逊服务整体形象的方式。例如，亚马逊已斥资数亿美元收购电影和电视节目版权，还将这些内容制作成流媒体，向Prime订户免费播放，作为额外的激励手段。
Whatever Mr Bezos’s long-term influence on the Post may be, his leadership of Amazon indicates that orchestrating a short-term surge in the newspaper’s profits will not be on his agenda.
不过，不论贝佐斯对《华盛顿邮报》有什么长期影响，他对亚马逊的领导风格意味着，令该报盈利出现短期上扬不会在他的日程之内。 |
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