- Amazon's Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million
- Dan Sinker: I hope it was the Bezos who shepherded Amazon Web Services into being
- He says with AWS, a transformative technology, Bezos embraced experiments
- Sinker: Leadership that allows journalists to invent and experiment is what we need
Editor's note: Dan Sinker is director of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, which is helping build the community around open-source programming in journalism.
(CNN) -- Which Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million?
Was it the Bezos who helped recover two Apollo-era F-1 engines from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean this spring? A savior capable of raising rusted heaps out of their watery graves?
Was it the Bezos who's sunk $42 million into the "Clock of the Long Now," a timepiece that will run for 10,000 years entombed inside a man-made cavern carved into the top of a mountain outside of Ely, Nevada? An eccentric billionaire who'll drop vast amounts of money into, well, a hole in the ground?
Was it the Bezos who founded Amazon, the biggest store in the world, a company that has both transformed and trampled nearly every formerly brick-and-mortar industry it has entered, from books to shoes and beyond?
Or was it the Bezos whose personal investments -- in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Makerbot, Uber and many others -- demonstrate an innate understanding of the shifting trends of the web?
Each one of those Jeff Bezoses would do interesting things to the Washington Post (well, maybe not the crazy mountain clock guy).
But as someone who spends every day thinking about the intersection of journalism and technology, I hope it was the Jeff Bezos who shepherded AWS -- Amazon Web Services -- into being.
Unless you build things on the Internet, you've probably never heard of AWS. That's because AWS is in one of the world's least sexy businesses: server and computational infrastructure.
The Washington Post Company announced on Monday, August 5, that it was selling its newspaper business to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Bezos says he understands "the critical role the Post plays in Washington, D.C., and our nation." Take a look at a brief history of a newspaper that inspired a generation of journalists. 
The Washington Post Company will hold onto the Post's headquarters in downtown Washington. Although it was not included in the deal, the building has been for sale since February. 
Art critic Philip Kennicott, left, listens to executive editor Martin Baron in the Washington Post newsroom after Kennicott was announced as a Pulizter Prize winner on April 15, 2013. Over the years the paper has earnerd dozens of Pulitzers, journalism's most prestigious award. 
Marcus Brauchli announces he will resign as executive editor to take a new position within the company on November 13, 2012. He became vice president of the Post Company and was replaced by Martin Baron, former editor of the Boston Globe. 
The Washington Post Company sells struggling Newsweek magazine in August 2010 to audio industry pioneer Sidney Harman for $1 and an agreement to take on its financial liabilities. For most of its 80-year history, Newsweek was owned by the Post. At the end of 2012, the magazine abandoned its print version. 
People take copies of the Post's special election edition on November 5, 2008, outside the newspaper's offices in Washington. The issue highlighted Barack Obama's historic presidential victory. 
Executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., gets a hug from publisher Katharine Weymouth on June 23, 2008, after he announced that he will give up his title. At right, Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of the Post, holds the microphone. Established in 1877, the Post has been run by the heirs of Eugene Meyer since 1933. Graham is Meyer's grandson and Weymouth's uncle. 
Web producer Dan Jung edits video in the Washington Post newsroom on June 26, 2004. The newspaper launched washingtonpost.com in 1996. 
The Post agrees to publish the unedited 35,000-word manifesto of the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, on September 19, 1995. It was done at the request of Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI in hopes of ending the 17-year letter bomb campaign. 
Katharine Graham, left, who led the Post for more than two decades, poses with her daughter, journalist and socialite Lally Weymouth, and Barry Diller, chairman of 20th Century Fox, at a party in 1988. 
Publisher Donald Graham poses for a portrait in 1983. After filling various editorial, production and executive roles, he succeeded his mother, Katharine Graham, as publisher in 1979. He was later named chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company. 
New York Mayor Ed Koch reads the Washington Post in his office during the New York City newspaper strike in 1978. 
Katharine Graham addresses newsroom employees shortly after the beginning of the pressman's strike against the Post in October 1975. 
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein, left, and Bob Woodward broke stories about the Nixon administration's cover-up after the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The coverage earned the Post a Pulitzer Prize and sparked a congressional investigation that eventually led to Nixon's resignation in 1974. 
Executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham look over reports of the 1971 Supreme Court decision that permitted the paper to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers. The top-secret documents revealed that senior American leaders, including three presidents, knew the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. They also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. 
Owner Eugene Meyer, right, and publisher Philip Graham look over the first edition of the paper after the Washington Post and Times-Herald merger in 1954. Graham committed suicide in 1963, leaving his wife, Katharine, in charge of the company. 
Men work on typesetting the newspaper in the composing room of the Washington Post-Times Herald in 1954. 
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Photos: History of the Washington Post 
Amazon CEO buying Washington Post AWS began as a commerce problem. Amazon needed a massive server cloud for the holiday shopping season but only a fraction of it for the rest of the year. That means a lot of expensive servers would be sitting idle to make sure your Christmas presents don't get hung up when you press "purchase." So the idea hatched that those idle computer servers could be rented out to other companies. It worked.
Now, when you watch a movie streamed from Netflix, you're using AWS. When you check out your friend's picture on Instagram, read a blog on Tumblr, pin something on Pinterest, you're accessing AWS. Reddit, the "front page of the Internet"? That's built on AWS. The infrastructure of the Obama for America re-election campaign -- vaunted as the most technically sophisticated campaign in history -- relied on AWS, too. The size, scale and impact of the AWS server cloud is massive and growing.
AWS is one of the most transformative and oft-overlooked technologies of the last decade. And it started as little more than a "hare-brained scheme," as Benjamin Black, one of the original drafters of the technology, described it in 2009. AWS is about as "all of the buffalo" as you get in technology: Use every part of the tech stack so that your servers are always in use, either by you or by others.
With AWS, Bezos found value in every part of the process. He looked at risks and embraced "hare-brained" experiments. He saw opportunity in extending Amazon technology externally, not just keeping it all in-house (AWS serves the streaming movies of Amazon's competitor Netflix just as efficiently as it serves its own).
Similar to the creation of AWS, journalism has its done its share of invention and experiments that have transformed the Web.
Django, a Web framework used by companies like Pinterest and Instagram, got its start in the newsroom of the Lawrence Journal-World. Backbone, a Javascript library that powers sites like Hulu and Pandora, was created as part of the Document Cloud project at the New York Times. These newsroom technologies and others like them are transformational not just to journalism but to the entire Web the same way AWS doesn't power only Amazon.
These spinoffs, these "hare-brained" ideas, these bits and pieces of code that start in the newsroom and end transforming the Web itself, are what technologists in journalism do best when they have the right support and leadership behind them. That leadership is still too rare in the journalism industry. That may have changed in a big way on Monday.
In a letter written to Washington Post employees, Bezos says that, moving forward, "we will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."
Let's do it.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Sinker.
