For anyone who cares about the public-service function of journalism, guarded optimism should be the first reaction to the astonishing news that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will buy the Washington Post.

    It's clear that the Graham family, which has run the Post (WPO) for 80 years, was increasingly unable to shepherd its flagship property through the chaos of the massive, wrenching transformation the newspaper industry is undergoing. This is even more true of many newspaper chains that aren't family-controlled and are more beholden to investors and debt-holders. For them, meeting short-term financial goals in order to please stockholders or pay off debts -- even as revenue is falling through the floor -- is a much bigger priority than investing in the future, which is what the industry needs to do if it is to remain not only profitable, but socially relevant.

    Bezos, who will own the Post independently from Amazon (AMZN), has proven himself to be a long-term thinker, forgoing profits today (to the dismay of many on Wall Street) in order to continually improve service, gain market share and secure the loyalty of customers. (Slate.com,Foreign Policy, and TheRoot.com aren't part of the deal, though some regional papers are.)

    Of course, it's impossible to know what Bezos might be able to do with the company, but it seems a safe bet that he's going to invest rather than simply wring it for profits in the short term by cutting costs (and quality), as other newspaper companies like Tribune and Advance have done, often under the pretense of forging ahead into the new era of newspapering.

    Bezos seems to recognize that nobody has any idea what the new era of newspapering might look like five or 10 years hence. It's up to people like him to find out. He said in a statement:

    "The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."

    And to experiment will mean to spend money and accept much lower profit margins than the ones most newspaper publishers had gotten used to in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st. Bezos surely knows this -- why else would he bother?

    Last year, Bezos told Fortune: "The three big ideas at Amazon are long-term thinking, customer obsession, and willingness to invent." Replace "customer" with "reader" and those are just the ideas the newspaper industry needs to adhere to as the highly uncertain future unfolds.

    凡是关心新闻业公共服务功能的人，在听到亚马逊（Amazon）创始人杰夫•贝佐斯将收购《华尔街邮报》（Washington Post）的惊人消息之后，第一反应肯定是谨慎的乐观。

    如今，整个报纸行业正面临大规模的痛苦转型。在这样混乱的大背景下，执掌《华尔街邮报》80多年的格雷厄姆家族显然已经无力继续经营它最成功的资产。非家族性报业公司尤其如此，他们更多受惠于投资者和债权持有人。对于这些公司而言，为了取悦股东，偿付债务，即使公司的收入已经跌至谷底，短期财务目标的重要性仍然远远高于投资未来。但报纸行业既想实现盈利，又想与时俱进，就需要对未来进行投资。

    贝佐斯此次收购《华盛顿邮报》与亚马逊无关。贝佐斯已经证明自己是一位眼光长远的战略家。他将放弃眼前的利润（这将令华尔街的许多人大失所望），以持续改善服务、获得市场份额，同时保持消费者的忠诚度。【这宗交易将不包括Slate.com、《外交政策》（Foreign Policy）和TheRoot.com，但将包括多家地方性报纸。】

    当然，我们无从知晓贝佐斯会如何处理这家公司，但他肯定会进行投资，而不是像《论坛报》（Tribune）和先进出版公司（Advance）等其他报业公司那样，简单通过削减成本（和质量）获取短期利润。其他许多报业公司通常会打着进入报纸行业新时代的幌子，谋取短期利益。

    贝佐斯认为，没有人知道未来五到十年报纸行业的新时代会是什么样子。报纸行业的未来将取决于像他一样的人。他在一份声明中称：

    “互联网几乎改变了报纸行业的方方面面：它缩短了新闻周期，侵蚀了长期可靠的收入来源，同时产生了新的竞争，而且其中许多竞争对手根本无需承担、或只需要承担很少的新闻采集成本。报纸行业的发展没有路线图，要画出一条路来并不容易。我们需要创新，这意味着我们必须不断尝试。”

    而尝试就意味着投入，同时接受更低的利润率。报业公司大都习惯了20世纪后期和21世纪初的高利润率。贝佐斯对此当然心知肚明——那他为什么还要来趟这潭浑水呢？

    去年，贝佐斯层对《财富》杂志（Fortune）表示：“亚马逊坚持三个大的理念：长远思考、客户至上和愿意创新。”将“客户至上”换成“读者至上”，便是报纸行业面对高度不确定的未来时所需要坚守的理念。

    Bezos says current management will stay put and there will be no layoffs. That means Katharine Weymouth -- granddaughter of the late Katherine Graham, who led the paper during its most storied period, including the Watergate era -- will stay on as publisher. Another good sign in an industry skittish from years of cutbacks and management chaos, all of which can have a negative impact on the quality of work produced by a newsroom. (The New York Times diagnosed this as a major part of Newsweek's problems even as it attempted a Hail Mary merger with the Daily Beast.)

    The Post was among the earliest and savviest entrants into online news, even before the Web, and it has maintained a strong presence on the Internet, with popular initiatives like Ezra Klein's Wonkblog. At the same time, it still displays some of the tendencies of "old media" that turn off younger readers, such as often presenting the news dully and in binary "he said/she said" fashion, and maintaining an editorial page that sometimes seems aimed more at proving that the Post is politically "balanced" than at helping anyone understand the issues of the day. The paper will have also always passed up the opportunity to create Politico, arguably one of the most successful new media outfits.

    And of course the newspaper -- which has seen revenues fall by nearly half just in the past six years -- is at the mercy of the same market forces the rest of the industry has endured. Print circulation and ad revenues have continued their inexorable decline, and it had become clear in recent years that the current owners didn't have the stomach to fully transform the business. Weymouth herself said as much to the Post's media writer, Paul Farhi: "If journalism is the mission, given the pressures to cut costs and make profits, maybe [a publicly traded company] is not the best place for the Post."

    None of which means that Bezos will necessarily succeed. The industry's problems are structural -- it's not clear that professionally reported public-affairs journalism, the way we have come to know it through newspapers, can command a market price high enough to sustain its production. The Internet has split that kind of reporting off from the other parts of newspapers (like coupons, advice columns, and horoscopes) that stirred most of the demand for newspapers. Hard news now has to find its own market. And not even Bezos can necessarily make that work, nor will even he be patient forever. "We believe in the long term," he told Fortune last year, "but the long term also has to come."

    贝佐斯表示，报社目前的管理层将继续留任，也不会裁员。这意味着已故凯瑟琳•格雷厄姆的孙女凯瑟琳•韦慕斯将继续担任报社发行人。韦慕斯领导这份报纸期间，它经历了最具传奇色彩的发展时期，其中包括水门事件。这对于报纸行业而言是另外一个好的信号。之前，报纸行业经历了多年裁员和管理层混乱，对报纸的质量造成了负面影响。【《纽约时报》（The New York Times ）曾经认为这是《新闻周刊》（Newsweek）所面临的主要问题，尽管后者曾孤注一掷，尝试与《每日野兽》（Daily Beast）合并】。

    《华盛顿邮报》是最早尝试在线新闻、同时也是最懂行的参与者之一，时间甚至早于网络的诞生。目前，它在互联网上依然具有强大的影响力，许多栏目也颇受欢迎，如厄兹拉•克莱恩的栏目Wonkblog。但与此同时，它也表现出“旧媒体”的一些趋势，造成年轻读者日益流失。比如新闻内容通常乏味冗长，采用“公说公理，婆说婆理”的报道模式；而且报纸的社论版似乎只是为了证明《华盛顿邮报》在政治上没有立场，而不是为了帮助读者理解当天发生的问题。此外，该报纸也失去了创建“政客新闻网”（Politico）的机会。后者被认为是最成功的新媒体机构。

    当然，报纸与整个行业都承受着同样的市场压力。过去六年，《华盛顿邮报》的收入几乎减少了一半。印刷品发行量和广告收入的下降趋势不可阻挡。很明显，它现在的老板已经没有勇气对公司业务进行全面改革。韦慕斯自己也曾对《华尔街邮报》媒体记者保罗•法伊表达过类似的观点：“如果说新闻业是一种使命，那么鉴于削减成本和盈利的压力，上市或许并不是《华盛顿邮报》最好的归宿。”

    当然，这并不意味着贝佐斯一定能成功。报纸行业所面临的是结构性问题——我们并不能确定，我们通过报纸了解的那些专业报道的公共事件新闻能否产生足够高的市价，以支撑报业生产。互联网迫使报纸将新闻报道与最能刺激消费者需求的其他部分（如优惠券、意见栏和星座等）分离。纯粹的新闻必须找到自己的立足之地。即便是贝佐斯也不见得能取得成功，而且他的耐心总有耗尽的时候。去年，他就曾对《财富》杂志表示：“从长远来看，我们充满信心。但再远的未来也有走到头的时候。”（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓