The Washington Post is coming up with a creative new way to make money. The newspaper, now owned by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, wants to license its own back-end content management platform to smaller media entities, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The FT notes that potential customers include local and regional newspapers that already have content-sharing deals with the Post. Student newspapers at places like Yale and Columbia are also testing out the software.

Licensing technology is certainly a novel new way to create revenue for a newspapers that have seen their bottom line suffer over the past decade with the advent of online media.

But it’s unsurprising to see the strategy from the Post, which Bezos bought for $250 million in October 2013. The FT also noted that the Post hired 20 engineers this year while also developing new internal software that “both suits the Post’s needs and could be opened up to other users.”

SOURCE: geekwire.com