{"id":8559,"date":"2013-08-06T07:34:05","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T07:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=8559"},"modified":"2013-08-06T07:34:05","modified_gmt":"2013-08-06T07:34:05","slug":"amazon-to-buy-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=8559","title":{"rendered":"Amazon to buy Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeff<\/a>
Jeff Bezos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amazon founder\u00a0Jeff\u00a0Bezos\u00a0will buy\u00a0the Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0newspaper for $250-million in a surprise deal that ends an 80-year ownership of the paper by the Graham family and hands one of the United States’s most influential publications to the businessman whose internet company has transformed retailing.<\/p>\n

Bezos, hailed by many as technology visionary, called his acquisition a personal endeavor and reassured employees and readers of the 135-year-old newspaper that he will preserve its journalistic tradition, while driving innovation.<\/p>\n

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The acquisition, the latest in a flurry of deals for print publications, including the New York Times Company’s sale of\u00a0the Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0for $70-million, is a another sign of the unprecedented challenges newspapers face as advertising revenue and readership decline.<\/p>\n

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Shares of\u00a0the Washington Post\u00a0Company climbed more than 5% to $599.85 after the announcement \u2013 their highest level in almost five years.<\/p>\n

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Chairperson and chief executive of\u00a0the Washington Post\u00a0Company, Donald Graham, said in an interview that he and his niece Katharine Weymouth, Washington Post <\/em>publisher, made the decision to put the newspaper up for sale earlier this year after looking at its financial forecasts.<\/p>\n

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“For the first time in either of our lives we said to each other: is ownership by\u00a0the Washington Post\u00a0Company the best thing for the newspaper? We could keep it alive, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was could we make it strong?”<\/p>\n

The Amazon chief executive took his message directly to employees in a letter posted on the newspaper’s website.<\/p>\n

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“I understand the critical role the Post<\/em> plays in Washington, DC and our nation, and the Post<\/em>‘s values will not change,” Bezos\u00a0wrote in the letter.<\/p>\n

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“There will of course be change at the Post<\/em> over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership,”\u00a0Bezos\u00a0added. “We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”<\/p>\n

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In addition to the newspaper,\u00a0Bezos\u00a0gets other publishing businesses, including the Express<\/em> newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers,\u00a0Southern Maryland Newspapers,\u00a0Fairfax County Times<\/em>,\u00a0El Tiempo Latino<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Greater Washington Publishing.<\/p>\n

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The real estate, including the paper’s headquarters business and online news sites such as Slate<\/em>, will remain with the Washington Post\u00a0Company, and the paper’s operations will be kept separate from Amazon.com, according to\u00a0the Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0is the seventh largest daily in the\u00a0US.<\/p>\n

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While its legend and status loom\u00a0large, the Washington Post<\/em> represents only a fraction of the company which has expanded into a stable of holdings, including education and healthcare services and, most recently, industrial supplies.<\/p>\n

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And yet,\u00a0the Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0suffers from the same hurdles besieging big city newspapers across the\u00a0US. The company’s newspaper division reported an operating loss of $49.3-million for the six months ending June, compared to a loss of $33.2-million during the same period last year.<\/p>\n

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Weymouth, who will continue to serve as the paper’s chief executive\u00a0and publisher after the sale, said she did not think there was a “magic bullet” to resolving the paper\u2019s problems, but that the resources\u00a0Bezos\u00a0brought to the table were a plus.<\/p>\n

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“He’s smart and innovative and has access to a lot of smart people,” she said.<\/p>\n

Bezos, who has built\u00a0Seattle-based Amazon.com into a shopping and online technology force over the last two decades, made a small foray into media earlier this year with an investment in internet news site Business Insider<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Bezos\u00a0is the world’s 19th richest person with a fortune of $25.2-billion, according to\u00a0Forbes<\/em>. His investment vehicle,\u00a0Bezos\u00a0Expeditions, is invested in a number of companies including\u00a0Twitter\u00a0and Business Insider.<\/p>\n

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His major personal project is called Blue Origin, which aims to be one of the first non-government funded ventures to send people and cargo into space, potentially winning lucrative contracts that were once fulfilled by NASA.<\/p>\n

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Bezos\u00a0has already spent millions of dollars on this project, with millions more in the pipeline.<\/p>\n

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He did not elaborate in great detail on his motivations behind his latest deal, which caught many industry watchers by surprise. He does not play a prominent role in politics but has been described by friends as holding libertarian views. He and his wife did make public a $2.5-million contribution to a Washington state campaign to legalize same-sex marriage last year.<\/p>\n

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The deal comes on the heels of near-unprecedented media deal activity this year, with the Globe<\/em> transaction announced just over the weekend, News Corp spinning out its newspapers, and the Tribune Company hiving off its publishing business like\u00a0the Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Chicago Tribune<\/em>\u00a0from its broadcasting division.<\/p>\n

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“It will be interesting to see, is this the first step in the transformation of the business?” said\u00a0John Miller, senior vice president at\u00a0Chicago’s\u00a0Ariel Investments, a top-10 investor in\u00a0the Washington Post<\/em>. “The board is making the right decision. They obviously felt like it was a good deal. It will be interesting to see how they allocate capital going forward.” \u2013 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon founder\u00a0Jeff\u00a0Bezos\u00a0will buy\u00a0the Washington Post\u00a0newspaper for $250-million in a surprise deal that ends an 80-year ownership of the paper by the Graham family and hands one of the United States’s most influential publications to the businessman whose internet company has transformed retailing. Bezos, hailed by many as technology visionary, called his acquisition a personal endeavor … Continue reading “Amazon to buy Washington Post”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[2876,4770,4771],"class_list":["post-8559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-amazon","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-washington-post"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/bezos.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8561,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8559\/revisions\/8561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}