I guess that most normal people, upon learning that Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post, will just shrug and move on. For folks in the universe that I inhabit, in contrast, it’s a really intriguing development. This is the first time that someone who really understands the digital world has acquired a leading newspaper. So this story is not just about the future of a single US paper. It may have useful lessons for the entire industry. The shrewdest comments on the development that I’ve seen so far come from the Reuters columnist, Jack Shafer. Here’s an extract:

In acquiring the Washington Post, Bezos enters a business that is not radically different from the ones he already owns. Reporters and editors like to think their literary arts are central to newspapering. But it’s better to think of a newspaper as a coordination problem that manufacturing and distribution solves daily: Copy, art, and advertising is beamed from newsroom to printing plant, bundled newspapers flow from the plant to trucks, are transferred to carriers, and are delivered to your front door. Nobody knows more about deadline deliveries and distribution than Bezos’s Amazon, which has spoiled several nations with its reliable service. I can’t imagine what plans Bezos has for the print edition of the paper—if I did, I’d be worth $25.2 billion—but I’m confident that he will maximize the value of the existing Post delivery system in novel ways. It would not surprise me to see him use the Post network of trucks and carriers to enter the local delivery business as a pilot project. Obviously, he’s learned a lot from same-day delivery he could share with the paper.

Although most of us think of Amazon as a retailer, the computer sector has long regarded it as a tech company, competing with IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others as a seller of “cloud” computing power through its Amazon Web Services subsidiary. It’s also a computer devices company, via its Kindle readers. The sort of computer resources and ingenuity Bezos can bring to the Post—or more properly the washingtonpost.com—rival that of almost every other regional purveyor of news, entertainment, communications, and advertising. Any competing web property, cable systems, mobile phone system, or broadcasting operation in the Washington area should be on notice: Bezos means to use this foothold to go after the most lucrative parts of your businesses in the one of the richest corners of the country. He’ll spend you to death.

LATER: Another good piece — this time from Emily Bell. Excerpt:

At the end of a week that saw the Boston Globe sold for $70m by the New York Times Company, to Red Sox owner John W Henry, it seems that the lock gates transferring newspapers from a gilded past, through an unsustainable present, to to an unknown future have creaked open. Newspapers are now restored to their former status as playthings of the rich, rather than market-driven profit centers.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the transmission of west coast wealth to the crisis-torn content economy of old-fashioned east coast influence factories. The cultural divide between the thought processes of the engineering-oriented Silicon Valley and the words-based elites of the East, in politics and media, is vast. The low esteem in which each holds the other is often breathtaking to observe.

It was a “no contest” contest, an unfair fight, in which the new economy of the west coast understood how to build relationships with people, sell them what they wanted, charm the stock market – and do it at a scale and speed that could not be matched by analogue businesses.

This is what Bezos has been best at, and his enforcement of a cost-cutting regime has found Amazon on the wrong end of newspaper articles about its workplace practices. Bezos is more personally successful in Silicon Valley than most of his peers, with a fortune of $28bn, but from a background that has brushed more with the world outside Palo Alto. He was a Princeton computer science graduate rather than a Stanford PhD; he worked on Wall Street for a while before heading west and founding Amazon; he has made his vast fortune by shipping books, and tangible objects, atoms rather than bits and bytes. And he has successfully monetised the act of charging people for words on electronic devices, through the Kindle.

STILL LATER: A really good sceptical piece from John Cassidy of the New Yorker:

I have a nagging, if possibly unfounded, suspicion that his primary motivation in buying the Post is to protect Amazon’s interests in the political battle, which is sure to come, over the company’s monopolistic tendencies. Why do I suspect that? In part, because I am a skeptic. But also because it’s just about the only explanation that makes sense.

For the past fifteen years, Internet companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have been rightly lionized as triumphs of American entrepreneurship. As the Web matures, though, they are gradually coming to be viewed in a different light, as quasi-monopolies that need at least a modicum of oversight. Because of the presence of network effects and other sources of increasing returns to scale, there is a natural tendency for successful online companies to increase market share and, eventually, to dominate a specific market. Google dominates search and, through You Tube, it also dominates online video. Facebook dominates social networking and, through Instagram, microblogging. And Amazon dominates online retailing.

Any monopoly position in the market comes with the capacity for abuse. And behind Bezos’s public image as a smiling geek there is a ruthless business strategist. In the book market, Amazon has followed the classic monopolist’s script of cutting prices to build up its market share and eliminate competition. Now that its competitors are struggling or gone, there is some evidence Amazon is raising prices, although the company denies this. In other areas, too, the online retailer has thrown its weight around like an old-fashioned monopolist. As Amazon expanded across the country, it has sought to avoid collecting and paying sales taxes on the goods that it sells, thus preserving an unfair price advantage over brick-and-mortar competitors. (For more on this, see the recent cover story in Fortune “AMAZON’S (NOT SO SECRET) WAR ON TAXES.”)

At this stage, one of the main threats to the fortunes of companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook comes not from potential competitors but, rather, from the political authorities that are gradually awakening to their market power. Google’s search business has faced antitrust investigations in the United States and Europe. The Justice Department’s competition arm is moving to regulate Apple’s iTunes store. And Facebook and other online companies are facing questions about how they protect the privacy of their users.

So far, Amazon has gotten off easy.

Just watched, despairingly, Newsnight on BBC2 grappling with the “death of the newspaper”. The peg for this feeble item was the arrival of the Digger at Luton airport.  He has, it seems, flown the Atlantic in order to reassure his serfs and placemen at the Sun (a newspaper) that he is not going to close it down.** The Newsnight item followed the usual recipe: a short film report followed by a studio ‘discussion’ with three guests: a former tabloid editor, a doughty female hack (Joan Smith) and a young gel in impossibly high heels who is the UK head of the Huffington Post, a parasitic online creation that feeds on proper journalism.

The really annoying thing about the discussion was the way it failed to distinguish between format and function. The thing we need to preserve is not the newspaper (a form which was the product of a technological accident and a particular set of historical circumstances) but the function (provision of free, independent and responsible journalism). Once upon a time, publishing in print was the only way to ensure that the product of the function reached a public audience. But those days may be ending. The organisations traditionally known as “newspapers” need to transform themselves into journalistic outfits that produce a range of outputs, one of which — but only one of which — may be a printed paper.

The other thing that those who run newspapers need to realise is that digital technology implies businesses that earn much lower margins than analogue businesses did. In the old days, newspapers were often licences to print money. (The Digger’s Sun still is.) But in every industry where digital technology has taken hold, margins have shrunk. Could you support a newsroom of 120 journalists — plus all the material and distribution expenses that go with producing a print product — on the revenues that a newspaper website currently earns? Answer: no. But could you support a newsroom with 80 journalists and a purely online offering with the same revenues? Answer: possibly — provided you were prepared to settle for a modest return (say 5%) on investment.

**Later: Murdoch announced that he would be setting up a Sunday Sun — a continuation of the Screws of the World by other means. This was hailed by the mainstream media as a bold, defiant and possibly inspired tactic. I’m not so sure: it’s just possible that the Murdoch brand is now so toxic that the new gamble won’t wash. An alternative reading is that the old guy is finally losing his marbles. If the US laws against corrupt payments are triggered by the most recent developments (the arrest of Sun journalists on suspicion of making such payments to public officials) then the supine directors and shareholders of News International may finally be moved to, er, move.

Next month Jay Rosen, a blogger I admire, will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years. The impending anniversary has prompted a thoughtful blog post on the subject of “What I Think I Know About Journalism”.

It comes down to these four ideas.

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.

2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.

3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.

4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

He goes on to expound on these in detail.

Well worth reading in full.

Dave Winer had to read eight speeches by steam media big shots explaining their strategy for dealing with the online world. His typically thoughtful summary of what he found reads:

For Jay’s [Jay Rosen, NYU] class, our assignment is to figure out how these guys are trying to adapt.

Here’s how I visualize how they’re doing it. Imagine a box made of cardboard. It’s big, but it’s light. Pick the box up and move it from one place to another. When it gets to the new spot, it’s still a big cardboard box. It still can contain the same stuff as the box did when it was in the old place.

That’s the transition each of these execs feel they have to make. The stuff in the box are news stories. The box is their editorial structure. The old place is print. The new place is the Internet.

Spot on. But it’s not just media moguls who don’t get it. Academia can be just as obtuse.

Yesterday, the Greater Manchester police service implemented a brilliant idea — to log on Twitter every call they received over a 24-hour period. The Chief Constable, Peter Fahy, explained that he wanted

to use the experiment to demonstrate that only a third of the incidents reported are genuine crimes, with two thirds being ‘social work’ concerning incidents such as alcohol-related disturbances, relationship disputes and mental health issues.

Fahy told The Manchester Evening News, which is aggregating the tweets on its website: “This is not a gimmick. This is a genuine attempt to show people 24 hours of policing work. Crime is only one part but an important part of what we do.”

IMHO, the experiment was a brilliant success. It highlighted the amazing range of things that the police service is called upon to do, and made that point more forcefully than any official speech by a senior officer or Home Secretary could do.

But guess what? Some sections of the UK mainstream media — press and radio — spent the day carping about an alleged “waste” of police resources. Shouldn’t Manchester bobbies be out arresting criminals rather than sitting in an office “tweeting”? (Funny how that word can be used as a sneer. On the ‘Today’ programme, John Humphreys — Britain’s Technophobe-in-Chief — described tweets as “tiny Internet telephone messages”.) In fact, the tweets were done by two members of the Manchester force’s media department. But it’s interesting to see how unacknowledged bias (and technophobic snobbery) infects journalists who would bristle if one called them biased or partisan.