The Washington Post has the article Bezos could use Amazon model of customer targeting to reboot the newspaper industry.

The article starts with the following:

Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post promises not just an ownership change for the 135-year-old institution, but a potential transformation of the fusty mechanics of the newspaper business.

It remains to be seen whether the experiences of an Internet behemoth can be successfully applied to a legacy newspaper — and whether Amazon-style customer targeting would be palatable at a news organization.

I was thinking that the author of this article, coming from a traditional newspaper background, was missing the point a little bit.

My whole purpose for reading this article was the thought that Bezos would put into action the idea I posted in my 2010 post, Monetizing Internet Content. Toward then end of The Washington Post article came these paragraphs:

One move that Bezos might take at the outset is to end the paper’s new online subscription program, which limits how many stories readers can access without paying for a subscription, according to Stone, a journalist who has covered Amazon for more than 14 years.

“What is less customer-focused than a pay wall?” he asked. “You’re making it harder for people to read your story at the same time that there’s an abundance of competition.”

Now, I think they are on to something.  Of course, these paragraphs still haven’t contemplated the use of my idea exactly, but they do comprehend what is the problem with paywalls.  I expected Google would be the one to implement my ideas, but I see that Amazon is another company that has all the necessary technology.

It will be exciting to see whether or not The Washington Post company or Amazon will become a major seller of micropayment subscription plans that give the reader access to a wide assortment of articles from many newspapers and magazines.

Truth Out has the article The Wall Street Ties of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner by By Zaid Jilani.

In this article Jilani refers to another article, Speaking To Corporate Execs, Larry Summers Mocks Opponents Of Outsourcing As “Luddites”,

Summers lectured as the closing keynote speaker for the event, and was introduced by Surya Kant, the North American president of Tata Consultancy Services (which is listed on the event’s website as a sponsor of his speech), a Mumbai-based company that specializes in outsourcing. According to excerpts of his remarks released by event organizers, the former chief economic adviser actually championed outsourcing:

For executives planning their strategies in light of the “new normal” economy, renowned economist Larry Summers has some important advice: “There are those today who would resist the process of international integration; that is a prescription for a more contentious and less prosperous world…We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing.”

With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, Summers compared critics of the outsourcing of American jobs to “luddites who took axes to machinery early in England’s industrial revolution.” Unfortunately, the full of text of Summers’ remarks is mysteriously missing from the website — particularly odd given the fact that most of the other keynotes are posted online.

I suppose you could find a benign interpretation of Summers’ remarks, but I cannot imagine other former economic advisers to president Obama making similar remarks, Christine Roemer comes to mind.

While I can agree that, in principle, outsourcing and offshoring could have the beneficial effects expected of international integration, in the current environment, it is less likely to be beneficial.  The current environment includes Republican legislation that prevents our trade negotiators from considering environmental and labor impacts of trade negotiations.  With the war on unions and workers being waged in the US by the Republicans, it is unlikely that any interests other than those of big business will be promoted in any international trade pacts we can negotiate.