Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider, so in the wake of news that he's buying the Washington Post, folks have been asking me two questions: 
 
 The answer to the first question is that it's great to have Jeff Bezos as an investor. Any company that cares about building great products and services and long-term value could not ask for a better backer. He's patient and brilliant and he leads by example: If you ever have a question about how you should do something, you just look at Amazon. 
 
 Unlike the typical financial investor, moreover, Jeff Bezos really is focused on the long term. Whenever there's an opportunity to reinvest would-be profits today in an exciting project that might pay off tomorrow, Jeff Bezos will take it. And when he's an investor in your company, you'll feel like you should take it, too. 
 
 So, anyone rooting for the Washington Post to transform into a successful digital business should be thrilled that Jeff Bezos is buying it. 
 
 (Anyone hoping the Washington Post will never change, meanwhile, should find some other status quo to cling to. The status quo at the Post is dying with or without Bezos.) 
 
 As to the second question, why Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post ... 
 
 I don't know. 
 
 But I'm happy to speculate. 
 
 First, I'd guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be fun, interesting, and cool. And my guess is that, if that is all it ever turns out to be, Jeff Bezos will be fine with that. This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn't necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies. 
 
 Second, I'd guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that there are some similarities between the digital news business and his business (e-commerce) that no one in the news business has really capitalized on yet. 
 
 What similarities? 
 
 Well, for one thing, digital news and e-commerce businesses can be something that no traditional competitor can be: infinitely broad and infinitely deep. Stores and traditional media properties are limited by space constraints: They either have to be specialized, like Best Buy or Automotive Week, or, generalists, like Wal-Mart or the current Washington Post. Digital businesses don't have those constraints. They can be both broad and deep. 
 
 Another similarity is that digital news and e-commerce businesses can be deeply personalized. Just as every return visitor to Amazon sees a different front page, every return visitor to a news site can be presented with a different story selection. 
 
 A third similarity is that, in commerce and media, you don't have to own the whole market to do well. Tech businesses tend to be winner-take-most. Media and commerce, meanwhile, are vast, fragmented markets in which a small share can eventually become a big business (so you don't have to totally dominate to win). 
 
 Lastly, I'd guess that Jeff Bezos thinks there are many ways in which the news business might be complementary to Amazon. 
 
 How might the news business be complementary? 
 
 1. Amazon is already in the content production and distribution business — and news is just another kind of content. Amazon distributes massive amounts of print and digital content. The content the Washington Post publishes and distributes could be bundled or distributed with that content. And, similarly, the content that Amazon produces — mainly commerce-related, but increasingly media — could be integrated with the Washington Post's content, offering more choices for customers and consumers. 
 
 2. Amazon is already in the subscription and media-gadget businesses. Subscribers to Amazon's "Prime" delivery service already get to watch free movies and TV shows. Amazon Kindle buyers already have access to free books. It's easy to imagine that Prime subscribers and Kindle buyers will soon have convenient, free access to the Washington Post — and that this access might make a Prime subscription or Kindle ownership more valuable. Washington Post reporters, meanwhile, could produce an endless supply of e-books and Kindle Singles. 
 
 3. "News" is the digital equivalent of a high-traffic intersection: As people pass through to figure out what's happening they might also stop to do some shopping. Content and commerce companies have long dabbled with combining the two experiences, but no one has really nailed it. Given Amazon's expertise in affiliate marketing and advertising, it's not hard to imagine that the Washington Post could quickly become a laboratory for the next generation of integrated content and commerce. 
 
 4. Amazon is getting into the local physical delivery business — a business that the Washington Post is already in. Could stuff ordered from Amazon be delivered with your morning newspaper? Why not? And your daily newspaper — or parts of it — could certainly be delivered in a box with your Amazon stuff. I doubt that Bezos is really interested in the print version of the Post, but as long as it exists, it might be fun to fiddle with. 
 
 In short, there are lots cool synergies that Jeff Bezos and Amazon might want to experiment with. 
 
 And Jeff Bezos also appears to have gotten a reasonable deal. 
 
 Bezos is buying the Post for 0.5X revenue, or 2.5X digital revenue if you treat the print business as worthless. The digital revenue is growing. Given that the Post is currently losing about $50 million a year, Bezos' ultimate price tag may be considerably higher. But whatever he decides to do with the Post, it seems unlikely that he'll just perpetually bleed money away. ||||| Jeffrey P. Bezos, the incoming owner of The Washington Post and founder and chief executive of Amazon, is pictured during his first visit to the newspaper’s office after agreeing to buy The Post for $250 million. 
 
 Sept. 4, 2013 Jeffrey P. Bezos, the incoming owner of The Washington Post and founder and chief executive of Amazon, is pictured during his first visit to the newspaper’s office after agreeing to buy The Post for $250 million. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post 
 
 Jeffrey P. Bezos had a simple bit of advice for the staff of the newspaper he’ll soon own: Put readers, not advertisers, first. Don’t write to impress each other. And above all, “Don’t be boring.” 
 
 In a whirlwind series of meetings over two days, the Amazon.com billionaire charmed and disarmed rooms full of skeptical journalists with a relentlessly upbeat vision that evoked The Washington Post’s best traditions while promising to update them for a technologically advanced new era. 
 
 The Bezos plan for the news organization he has agreed to buy for $250 million centers on recreating the “daily ritual” of reading The Post as a bundle, not merely a series of individual stories. He was bullish about creating that experience on tablet computers, lukewarm about the prospects of doing so on the Web, and reassuring about the future of the old-fashioned newspaper itself — at least for the foreseeable future. 
 
 “People will buy a package,” Bezos said at one meeting of reporters and editors. “They will not pay for a story.” 
 
 Bezos seemed relaxed throughout two days of meetings, including a town-hall-style session in The Post’s community room before hundreds of journalists. He spoke without notes and joked often, punctuating some of his witticisms and self-deprecating comments with explosive laughter. He remained poised and good-humored from his perch on stage at the town-hall meeting despite fighting a balky sound system. 
 
 Jeff Bezos, the Internet mogul and Amazon.com founder, recently purchased The Washington Post in a historic shift for the newspaper. (Nicki DeMarco and Emi Kolawole/The Washington Post) 
 
 Bezos also repeatedly emphasized the importance of investigative journalism and said he was prepared to stand up to pressure in reporting stories that government officials might seek to suppress. He also said his political views were already in line with those of The Post’s editorial page and would defer to its editor, Fred Hiatt, on many matters. 
 
 “I don’t feel the need to have an opinion on every issue,” Bezos said. “I’m sure I don’t know much about things like Syria and foreign entanglements. I’m happy to let the experts opine on that.” 
 
 Among those in attendance at the newsroom-wide meeting were former executive editors Ben Bradlee and Leonard Downie Jr., former managing editor Robert Kaiser and star investigative reporter Bob Woodward, lending the event an intergenerational bridge to the newspaper’s storied past. (Donald E. Graham, whose family controlled the newspaper for 80 years, was not there, but his niece, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, was in attendance). 
 
 After 90 minutes of hearing Bezos lay out his thoughts, Bradlee, 92, counted himself among those who came away with a positive first impression. “I thought he was original,” he said. “That’s what impressed me the most.” 
 
 Throughout the day, Bezos returned to his idea of using tablets as a key vehicle for reaching a new generation of readers. While saying The Post’s print editions will remain for many years, he said tablet computers could offer readers a look and feel similar to a traditional printed paper. 
 
 “You have to figure out: How can we make the new thing? Because you have to acknowledge that the physical print business is in structural decline,” he said. “You can’t pretend that that’s not the case. You have to accept it and move forward. . . . The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past, no matter how good it was, especially for an institution like The Washington Post, which has such a hallowed past.” 
 
 In comments that cheered the newsroom, Bezos said The Post needed to grow in both revenue and readers, though he declined to say whether The Post newsroom would grow. “What has been happening over the last several years can’t continue to happen,” he said. “If every year we cut the newsroom a little more and a little more and a little more, we know where that ends.” 
 
 Or as he put it repeatedly in meetings: “All businesses need to be forever young. . . . If your customer base ages with you as a company, you’re Woolworth’s.” 
 
 Asked about the irony of his interest in buying a newspaper and Amazon’s practice of not commenting for many news stories, Bezos laughed and responded, “The most powerful minds can hold powerful inconsistencies.” He said one reason he often declines to comment is because he does not want his competition to know about his plans. “We’re not as silent or secretive as we’re sometimes portrayed,” he said of Amazon, conceding that “we are on the quiet side.” 
 
 Bezos, who will remain in Seattle after his purchase of The Post closes in October, sidestepped a question about his future involvement in the Washington area. “I would never out-Don Don. Impossible,” he said, referring to Graham. “I will have to do this as Jeff. And it’s going to be different for so many reasons, and one of them is that I’m going to be in Seattle.” 
 
 When asked to discuss Amazon’s motives in cutting off Web services for WikiLeaks in 2010, a time of intense government scrutiny of the anti-secrecy site’s disclosure of confidential military and diplomatic documents, Bezos said that the decision was made by unit managers and was not the result of government pressure. The company has previously said that WikiLeaks violated Amazon’s terms of service. 
 
 Yet Bezos made clear that though he believes in “American exceptionalism,” he sees The Post’s traditional watchdog roles as essential. 
 
 “We’re not perfect and our elected officials are not perfect and our regulators are not perfect,” he said in the newsroom question-and-answer session. “The credibility that an organization like The Washington Post brings is incredibly important.” 
 
 The reaction to the new boss from around The Post’s newsroom was widely favorable. 
 
 “What was most impressive was the combination of humility — that he doesn’t have all the answers yet — and the confidence that he will somehow figure it out,” said Marc Fisher, a veteran reporter and former Metro columnist. 
 
 Added Valerie Strauss, another Post veteran, who writes an education blog: “There was a lot he didn’t say, but what he did was well received. It’s going to be a very different place.” 
 
 Post reporters have already begun to refer to Bezos as “El Jeffe,” a play on the Spanish word for “chief” or “boss.” 
 
 He ended what amounted to a two-day charm offensive by recalling for the newsroom his own encounter, as a young boy in the 1970s, with the impact of Post journalism. 
 
 After apologizing for potentially embarrassing Woodward, Bezos said: “I watched the Watergate hearings on my elbow on the living-room floor next to my grandfather, who didn’t turn them off. And so these things make an impression.” 
 
 Steven Mufson contributed to this report.
– Jeff Bezos is a major Business Insider investor, so in the wake of the Washington Post buy, Henry Blodget has been fielding a lot of questions on what it's like to have the Amazon founder holding the purse strings. The answer? "It's great," Blodget writes. "Any company that cares about building great products and services and long-term value could not ask for a better backer." Unlike most financial investors, Blodget says Bezos is all about the long game, taking any chance to reinvest profits in exciting future possibilities. Bezos probably just thinks owning the Post will be cool, Blodget speculates. "This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn't necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies." Not that those don't exist: Amazon and the Post are both content creators, for starters, and Amazon is getting into the local physical deliveries business. Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post adds that the paper's brand will lend prestige to the fledgling Amazon Publishing, and that its webpage will be a high-traffic place to advertise Amazon's wares. "The Post doesn't need to generate revenue" anymore, DePillis writes. "It can complement and amplify other regions of Amazonia." Click here for Blodget's full column, or here for DePillis'.