Jeff Bezos And The Post Don't Know The Future Of Media, But Are Preparing For It Anyway

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There have been no plans to immediately end the print edition. Instead, during a recent visit to WPNYC in a nondescript office on the west side of Manhattan, the Post gave a look at a relatively unsexy piece of internal software with the distinctly prosaic name PageBuilder. See also: Washington Post Publisher Steps Down a Year After Bezos Acquisition PageBuilder does what its name implies, allowing journalists to build pages to feature content. Like Storify on steroids, it is built to pull in a wide variety of content and craft it into whatever format is desired a content management system for the open-source era. As far as innovations go, PageBuilder may not be exciting, but it is consistent with something Bezos said when he first bought the paper : nobody knows what the future holds for digital media, not even, Bezos. So instead of trying to get ahead of future trends, the best the paper can do is position itself for whatever changes will happen over the next few years. PageBuilder appears to be the first tangible example of this idea in practice, but it won't be the last. If the Post is finally embracing the notion that newspapers are truly dying, it will be just the first of many. Which may be why it is in this office, some 225 miles away from the newsroom, that the Post's tech and design skunkworks has been set up, along with a sales team. There are no journalists in the office. "We're not trying to come up with easier ways to produce the content that we've always produced," said Greg Franczyk, director of software engineering at the Post. Were looking at the actual content forms, the story forms, the type of content we're producing, structuring that content in ways that allows us to do and create user experiences that we haven't yet dreamt of. Breaking the habit If uncertainty is the only certainty, the main job becomes preparing a 137-year-old newspaper to stomach the chaos that comes with digital, as Shailesh Prakash, CIO of the Washington Post put it during an interview last week at the papers design and tech outpost in New York. The Post, like many newspapers, has not previously shown such fortitude. Print newspapers are stubborn beasts, having developed rhythms and cultures reinforced by decades in an industry that went mostly unchanged for decades despite the introduction of competitors like radio and television. The paper also occupies a special place in American media, serving as the biggest newspaper in the country's capital. The Post broke the Watergate scandal and has piled up 60 Pulitzer Prizes. It continues to operate 15 foreign bureaus, making it a rarity among modern newspapers. Despite ore maybe because of that prestige, in the last couple of decades, the newspaper has been relatively slow to embrace digital. Former Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, the last tie to the Graham family that owned the paper since 1933, once referred to herself as a print person by training and habit . In early September, the Washington Post replaced Weymouth, the most high-profile move by Bezos since he bought the paper . Her replacement, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., has been seen as an anticlimactic choice since he's a media guy, not a whiz kid from a top tech firm. The former CEO of politics website Politico, Ryan is also a well-known Washington,D.C., insider with no shortage of political and business connections in the capital. Bezos has said little about his purchase of the Post, but did tell Charlie Rose that he had to be convinced to buy it. Don Graham, the Post's former chairman was adamant, Bezos said, that the paper out to be owned by someone with a tech and Internet background. "I eventually came to believe that after having multiple conversations with Don," Bezos said. Lipstick on a pig Digitally, the Post is competitive. Its August monthly unique visitors are up more than 50% compared to the same time last year to just under 40 million, according to comScore.