After this important newspaper was sold it's impotant to know why.
This was published in The Washington Post on august 6
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth presented her uncle, company chief executive Donald E. Graham, with a once-unthinkable choice at a lunch meeting at downtown Washington’s Bombay Club late last year.
The paper was facing the likelihood of a seventh straight year of declines in revenue, with one preliminary budget estimate showing the possibility of $40 million in losses for 2013. And despite years of heavy investment in new digital offerings, there was little sign that robust profits were about to return, she reported.
That left three choices, Weymouth told Graham. The family could continue presiding over the gradual decline of the newspaper they loved. They could move more aggressively to cut the paper’s staff more deeply than ever, hoping that they could return The Post to sustained profitability by sacrificing its longtime excellence.
Or they could sell, cutting ties to one of America’s iconic news organizations after four generations of family control in the hopes that The Post could thrive again under a new, deep-pocketed, civic-minded owner.
That meeting triggered months of remarkably quiet maneuvering for a company that ordinarily prides itself in dragging other people’s secrets into the light. Eight months after Weymouth first raised the possibility, Graham arranged to sell The Post to Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos in a $250 million deal — after two key face-to-face meetings with a man who has scant journalistic experience.
Several factors allowed the deal to come together with relative speed. They included a long-standing friendship between Bezos and Graham, 68, an executive steeped in traditional newspaper publishing who had become a respected elder for a newer generation of tech magnates. Bezos was among the most successful of those, and the two men had on several occasions traded insights on their businesses.
“The Post is his baby,” Weymouth said of Graham. “He was not going to give his baby to anybody who he thought would not care for it properly.”
But also propelling each step was his reluctant acceptance that continuing to own The Post — so long synonymous with the Graham name — probably meant years more of cuts, with significant profits perhaps never returning for the family or the company’s other investors. He long has demanded that each of The Washington Post Co.’s divisions — including ones focusing on education, cable television and other markets — stand alone as viable businesses.
“You wouldn’t mind losing money if you thought you were building toward something two or three years from now, but that was not what Katharine was saying,” Graham recalled. “She was saying the decline in revenue was going to go on, so, you know, the only choice was lose money or cut costs. . . . It’s certainly an option to lose money for three or four years. The question was what would happen in three or four years.”
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This was published in The Washington Post on august 6
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth presented her uncle, company chief executive Donald E. Graham, with a once-unthinkable choice at a lunch meeting at downtown Washington’s Bombay Club late last year.
The paper was facing the likelihood of a seventh straight year of declines in revenue, with one preliminary budget estimate showing the possibility of $40 million in losses for 2013. And despite years of heavy investment in new digital offerings, there was little sign that robust profits were about to return, she reported.
That left three choices, Weymouth told Graham. The family could continue presiding over the gradual decline of the newspaper they loved. They could move more aggressively to cut the paper’s staff more deeply than ever, hoping that they could return The Post to sustained profitability by sacrificing its longtime excellence.
Or they could sell, cutting ties to one of America’s iconic news organizations after four generations of family control in the hopes that The Post could thrive again under a new, deep-pocketed, civic-minded owner.
That meeting triggered months of remarkably quiet maneuvering for a company that ordinarily prides itself in dragging other people’s secrets into the light. Eight months after Weymouth first raised the possibility, Graham arranged to sell The Post to Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos in a $250 million deal — after two key face-to-face meetings with a man who has scant journalistic experience.
Several factors allowed the deal to come together with relative speed. They included a long-standing friendship between Bezos and Graham, 68, an executive steeped in traditional newspaper publishing who had become a respected elder for a newer generation of tech magnates. Bezos was among the most successful of those, and the two men had on several occasions traded insights on their businesses.
“The Post is his baby,” Weymouth said of Graham. “He was not going to give his baby to anybody who he thought would not care for it properly.”
But also propelling each step was his reluctant acceptance that continuing to own The Post — so long synonymous with the Graham name — probably meant years more of cuts, with significant profits perhaps never returning for the family or the company’s other investors. He long has demanded that each of The Washington Post Co.’s divisions — including ones focusing on education, cable television and other markets — stand alone as viable businesses.
“You wouldn’t mind losing money if you thought you were building toward something two or three years from now, but that was not what Katharine was saying,” Graham recalled. “She was saying the decline in revenue was going to go on, so, you know, the only choice was lose money or cut costs. . . . It’s certainly an option to lose money for three or four years. The question was what would happen in three or four years.”
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