It's refreshing to see someone with deep pockets pumping millions of dollars into a venture as quaint and risky as a newspaper - even if he has floated the idea of "disemvowling" it.
Since Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, the newspaper's digital traffic has tripled. In an era of layoffs and attrition, he has added 70 reporters and editors to the newsroom staff. Returning the Post to profitability may be a gamble, but Bezos, who also founded Blue Origin, a space tourism venture, can apparently handle the pressures of risk.
It makes sense that a man of such freewheeling vision would enjoy swapping ideas with the Post's senior staff during brainstorming sessions. But according to a recent Fortune magazine profile of the publishing mogul, not all of Bezos' ideas are winners. A case in point was his concept of adding a game-like feature he called "disemvowling" to the online version of the newspaper, letting readers who disapprove of an article to pay a fee allowing them to remove all its vowels. Readers who like the piece would be able to restore the vowels by paying another fee.
The Post staff, thankfully, convinced their boss that his plan needed a little more work.
Since my plans to repurpose vacant composing room and newsroom space in the Charleston Newspapers building by adding a video lottery parlor and a state-subsidized greyhound breeding operation have fallen on deaf ears, maybe I should run with Bezos' idea instead. In addition to borrowing his disemvowling feature, we could create such pay-to-play schemes as:
Verbal Disuse - Allows readers to pay to remove action words from stories they don't like.
Becoming Inconsonant - Allows premium-paying readers to remove consonants, as well as emptying vowels, from offending pieces.
Capital Punishment - Makes it possible for fee-payers to raise the hackles of reporters and copy editors by capitalizing words that should, according to the AP Stylebook, remain lower case.
Commakaze - A video feature that lets online readers pay to simulate blowing up unneeded commas and their inverted cousins, superfluous apostrophes, when they appear in Gazette-Mail stories.
Ampersand in Your Face - Game allows fee-payers to kick out the 'ands' in offending stories and substitute the '&' symbol to free up more space for higher quality items.
Colonoscoplay - Readers pay for the right to replace colons or semicolons with dashes, periods or any other punctuation marks they deem more appropriate or more fun.
On reflection, I may just try to fine tune my earlier ideas for creating new revenue streams.
If I were a gambling man, I bet this is what Jeff Bezos would have to say about my scheme:
"Gd lck wth tht!"