Rieder: Bezos wows 'Washington Post' staff

• News company%27s new owner meets with staffers
• Participants say meeting was upbeat
• His primary task%3A Brighten the %27Post%27s%27 financial prospects

He wowed them.

Washington Post owner-to-be Jeff Bezos didn't offer a lot of specifics about his plans for his iconic acquisition when he met with the editorial staff Wednesday at a town hall meeting.

But he said all the right things.

Most important, the digital billionaire exuded the sense all is not lost for struggling legacy journalism operations like the Post, that despite their travails in a dramatically new media landscape, they may well have a future. If he thought the mission were hopeless, he said, he wouldn't have taken it on.

Whether Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and Post executives can find a solution for newspapers struggling to adapt to the digital age, time will tell. But his is an exciting message for everyone who cares about quality journalism, not just at the Post but across the country.

The upbeat tenor of the meeting was clear from interviews with Post staffers who were there and the barrage of tweets that emanated from the session. The staffers asked that their names not be used so they could speak freely about the new owner.

One Postie told me that people are very excited that someone wanted to take on this challenge, seemingly for all of the right reasons. Another said that the new boss has won over some of the most cynical, skeptical people on the planet.

One staffer was particularly impressed by the sense that, while Bezos is hardly claiming he has found the magic bullet, he doesn't believe the problems facing the Post are unconquerable. The Post, which has suffered significant declines in its print advertising revenue and its circulation, of course, is hardly alone. The entire newspaper industry has been besieged in the Internet era, as readers and advertisers have gravitated to the digital world and online revenue has proved elusive.

Bezos, who is buying the Post for $250 million from its longtime owners, the Graham family, repeatedly promised that Post journalists would have independence, according to people at the meeting.

The Post has struggled to stay afloat with lots of cost cutting in recent years, dramatically shrinking the size of it news staff. But Bezos rejected that approach, saying it is destructive.

He also rejected the notion of attracting eyeballs to washingtonpost.com with empty-calorie link bait, saying such cheap page views are worthless. The key, he believes, is to attract readers with a cluster of interesting material — say, investigative reporting, restaurant reviews and music coverage — for one price, in a package that will become an essential part of their daily lives.

That, of course, is what newspapers traditionally have done. But in the digital world, news has become unbundled, as viewers are attracted to niche sites that focus on subjects about which they are passionate.

The challenge for Bezos & Co. is to figure out how to put the bundle together in a way that makes money.

Bezos, who is well known for his reluctance to speak to the press, brings several significant advantages to the table. His immense wealth provides what he calls "runway" time for the Post to experiment on all platforms as it searches for a way to thrive, not just survive. His background as a digital entrepreneur is another plus.

Bezos told the staffers that friends had told him that he should cut the cord and eliminate the print version of the Post. But the Amazon man rejects that approach as naive, saying the newspaper is essential to both readers in the Washington, D.C., area and to the company's business model.

Bezos is buying the paper as an individual, not as part of Amazon.

In a meeting earlier Wednesday with a small group of Post reporters and editors, Bezos said that all businesses "need to be young forever," a Post story about the meeting said. A Bezos mantra: "If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's. The No. 1 rule has to be: Don't be boring."

In an interview with the Post media writer Paul Farhi earlier this week, Bezos also sounded all of the right notes. He said he planned to stress the three things that have worked so well for him at Amazon: "Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient."

He said he would offer his "point of view" on how the news organization should evolve, but indicated that he wouldn't be issuing edicts. He's not moving to Georgetown, he's staying where his day job running Amazon is in Seattle.

"If we figure out a new golden era at the Post ... that will be due to the ingenuity and inventiveness and experimentation of the team at the Post," he said in the interview. "I'll be there with advice from a distance. If we solve that problem, I won't deserve credit for it."

During his meeting with Post staffers, Bezos was very frank about the fact that he is not a journalist. He said he would have to lean hard on Post Executive Editor Marty Baron, who is staying on in the new regime.

But Bezos also made it clear that journalism really matters to him. As the session wound down, he talked of watching the Watergate hearings with his grandfather, an experience he found riveting. Watergate, of course, was perhaps the Post's high-water mark, when its reporting played an important part in bringing down a corrupt president.

In a conversation just after the town hall meeting ended, one staffer told me that it really seemed that Bezos has his heart in the right place.

Let's hope his stewardship of the Post is nearly as good as his bravura performance Wednesday.