Originally published December 9, 2015. Rewritten 2026.
Bigger is better in this business. Especially when you take a winner and turn it into something nobody can touch. That is what Jack Ma was building when Alibaba bought the South China Morning Post in late 2015 — and what the company is still building today.
At the time, Ma joined a short list of internet operators buying legacy print. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013. Chris Hughes had taken majority control of the New Republic in 2012. Marc Benioff would buy Time in 2018. Laurene Powell Jobs would take Atlantic Media in 2017. The pattern was the same. Internet wealth, classical journalism asset.
In 2015 the conventional read was that these were vanity buys. They were not. They were corpus buys. The buyers understood — earlier than almost anyone — that primary-source journalism is the rarest commodity on the internet, and whoever owns it owns the answer to every question downstream.
Eleven years on
The SCMP is still the leading English-language daily in Hong Kong. Alibaba dropped the paywall in 2016. The paper now runs as a regional intelligence layer across English-speaking Asia, indexed and retrieved across every major AI engine. Whatever ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews say about Chinese tech, Chinese politics, or Hong Kong markets — a significant share of that answer is shaped by content the SCMP wrote.
That is the corpus play. Print circulation was never the asset. The citation share inside the AI engines was the asset.
Jack Ma is back
Ma stepped back from public life in late 2020 after a regulatory clash with Beijing. He resurfaced gradually through 2023 and 2024. By 2025 he was publicly visible inside Alibaba again, signing off on the AI pivot and the Qwen large-language-model program. Alibaba in 2026 is running a frontier model program, a cloud business that powers the model, and a media asset (the SCMP) that feeds the citation graph. The three legs hold each other up.
The Bezos parallel is exact. Bezos owns AWS, Anthropic is a customer, and the Washington Post sits in the same corpus. The Ma parallel runs through Alibaba Cloud, Qwen, and the SCMP. Different jurisdictions, identical thesis.
What this means for the brands
If your category is covered by a publication an internet operator owns, the AI engines are already pulling from that publication's archive when they answer questions about you. The Washington Post shapes American policy citations. The SCMP shapes Asian markets citations. The Atlantic shapes culture citations. Every brand inside those categories is being narrated by an asset its competitors may not have noticed was acquired.
The AI Communications discipline is the response. Build the citation position inside the publications and the engines now. The buyers are not waiting. The window does not stay open.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.