Washington Post working on curated news app for the new 8.9" Kindle Fire launching this fall; app will come to other tablets eventually
Jeff Bezos's New Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon Product — Jeff Bezos wants to turn the Washington Post into a national publication …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon has spent years deciding what the Kindle line was for — first whether it would ever open to developers [[a:1186234]], then whether it would become a full tablet at all, with Bezos offering only a 'stay tuned' back in 2011 [[a:1191238]]. Once committed, Amazon built a media storefront around it, stocking the Kindle Fire Newsstand with GQ, Wired and dozens of magazine titles in late 2011.
The new wrinkle is ownership: the Businessweek report frames the Post as an Amazon product under Jeff Bezos, shipping a curated news app bundled with this fall's 8.9-inch Kindle Fire rather than selling through the Newsstand like everyone else. The pickup list — the New York Times, TechCrunch, Engadget, Gigaom and others all carried the same story on October 6 — shows how much attention a Bezos-linked hardware-content tie-up draws.
First-order effects
- The Washington Post gets guaranteed placement on every new 8.9-inch Kindle Fire sold this fall, with the confirmed plan to extend the app to other tablets giving it a distribution channel independent of app-store rankings.
- Amazon gets first-party editorial content no rival tablet can preload, differentiating the Fire lineup at launch season without a new price move like the installment plans it pushed for the Kindle Fire HDX in December 2013.
Second-order effects
- Other major publishers face pressure to negotiate their own device-level deals with tablet makers, or risk being one swipe deeper in the carousel than the Post when buyers turn on a new Fire.
- If the app lands well on non-Amazon tablets, Amazon gains leverage over Android and iPad competitors whose devices now carry a rival owner's flagship daily — turning the Post's newsroom into a bargaining chip in tablet merchandising.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward news organizations being absorbed as strategic assets of platform and hardware companies, where a paper's value is measured partly in differentiation for someone else's device rather than its own subscription economics.
- If bundled-first-party-news proves out, the Newsstand-style open marketplace model gives way to selective vertical deals, narrowing which publishers get default placement and raising the stakes of who owns whom.
The trend: Hardware and platform owners are pulling newsrooms inside the company line, treating editorial content as a built-in differentiator for tablets rather than a product sold alongside them.