Post by bob quarteroni on Aug 6, 2013 9:51:53 GMT -5
From the Huffington Post. Amazon is going head-to-head with Google to achieve total domination of the globe. It's kind of scary but, like
a Japanese train going 120 miles an hour around a tight curve, probably impossible to stop.
Still waiting for that first post. Maybe you've all been drugged by reading Joe B's odd columns, or being forced to watch Maureen Clark as she tries to launch herself into the air at the beginning of each of her weather segments. Thank the God I don't believe in for the mute button on the remote.
In a stunning announcement, the Washington Post said Monday that it has been sold for $250 million to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Publisher Katharine Weymoth made the announcement at a hastily called meeting of the paper's staff on Monday. She will stay on as publisher, and editor Martin Baron will also retain his job.
The purchase is a personal one for Bezos, who is worth $25.2 billion. Amazon is not involved.
Bezos also bought the Washington Post Company's other newspaper titles, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing. The company's non-newspaper properties, such as Slate, The Root, and the Kaplan educational division, are not being sold.
Post Co. CEO Donald Graham, whose family has owned the Post for generations, said in a statement that the economics of the print industry had led to the decision. The company's newspaper division has been facing tremendous struggles in recent years; in the first half of 2013, it lost $49.3 million.
Even so, the Post is not just another newspaper, and the Grahams are not ordinary owners. Along with the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, they were one of the last remaining links to an era when most papers were run by families, not huge corporations. The Grahams were viewed as owners that put journalism before profit, and their defense of the Post during the Nixon and Watergate years is still seen as a high-water mark of American journalism. The decision to sell the paper is undoubtedly historic—the "end of an era" if ever there was one.
"I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post," Graham said.
In a letter to staffers, he elaborated on the move, saying that it was borne out of his family's long-standing desire to protect the paper:
The point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for the Post. As the newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we have no answers, Katharine and I began to ask ourselves if our small public company was still the best home for the newspaper. Our revenues had declined seven years in a row. We had innovated and to my critical eye our innovations had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn’t made up for the revenue decline. Our answer had to be cost cuts and we knew there was a limit to that. We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed.
