Earlier this month Bezos’ newsie, The Washington Post, quietly announced the rebranding of its SaaS publishing platform Arc Publishing (now Arc XP).
Originally given out for free to college newspapers, the homegrown publishing suite is no longer an internal tool by The Washington Post.
Today, it’s a full-fledged SaaS business:
Arc XP is even scooping up non-publisher customers, providing websites and ecommerce solutions for British Petroleum and even the Golden State Warriors.
After purchasing the paper in 2013, Bezos vowed to reshuffle the deck. Changes included shifting the paper’s focus to national coverage, moving toward digital-first subscriptions, and investing in its publishing tech.
According to a recent article about outgoing executive editor Martin Baron, the disruption is just beginning:
In his letter announcing his departure from Amazon, Bezos named The Washington Post as an area of future focus.
And it also shouldn’t surprise anyone — The Post’s Arc XP runs almost entirely on AWS, using 100 AWS tools and services.
So you have the world’s richest man + the world’s largest and most capable cloud provider + restored publishing powerhouse.
The NYT is def shaking in its crossword puzzle section right now.