Jeff Bezos has a business problem

But it’s also because newspapers were an oligopoly, and they lose that oligopoly online. Newspapers are, yes, a content business, but they were also a light manufacturing business, and it was the replacement of light manufacturing and trucking with bits that removed the barrier to entry and unbundled their attention.

By piloting programs, like the legal-defense fund, that “re-create some of the value provided by newsrooms,” as McKenzie put it, Substack has made itself difficult to categorize: it’s a software company with the trappings of a digital-media concern.

The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale