The Washington Post Company announced Monday it was selling its newspaper business, including the flagship Washington Post, to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million.Right, and next he'll buy up a buggy-whip factory.
I say that because the NY Times just sold the Boston Globe for $70 million. Compared to what they paid for it, they sold the paper for six cents on the dollar or, if you adjust for inflation, four cents on the dollar. On the other hand, they bought the Globe with stock and sold it for cash, so maybe it's not as bad a deal as it looks.
The only good note is that at least Rupert Murdoch didn't get his mitts on either paper, not that the WaPo has been any shining beacon of truth and liberty of late. As I remember it, they weren't as complicit in selling the Iraq War as their competition several Amtrak stops to the north, but they were not far behind.
The Post has done done decent work in the last several years; they ran the first articles on the gross and systemic neglect of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital. They also ran a series on the rise of the American security state apparatus and the contractors who fueled it.
Still, I can't see Bezos, or anyone else, for that matter, shelling out a quarter-billion dollars in a quest to uphold a grand, if somewhat shabby, tradition of American journalism. Compared to Bezos's net worth, he paid what would roughly be several hundred bucks to an average family, but that's just going to be the initial payment in what'll probably cost him a lot more.
Other than gaining some control over one of the larger megaphones in D.C., I can't see what he has to gain from this deal.
The decision makers inside the Beltway still read the Post and take it seriously. My guess is that this is more a political play than a profit play, sort of like when the Moonies bought the Washington Times. Except unlike the Times, the Post actually has influential readers. Jeff Bezos just bought policymaker eyeballs for cheap, from his perspective -- he might not be able to get the time of day from them if calling directly, but by putting it in the Washington Post, he gets access far beyond anything that paid lobbyists have. He gets their morning coffee time.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it's safe to say "at least the Koch brothers didn't buy it."
ReplyDeleteMy take on Jeff Bezos is that he's mostly just the Koch brothers if they'd grown up in the Internet era rather than in the Paleolithic. They say he's drunk the Libertarian kool-aid big-time, which is why he treats his workers so badly ("if they don't like how I treat them they can just go work for someone else!", ignoring the fact that there are four unemployed people for every job opening in today's economy).
ReplyDeleteink by the barrel = AWS [https://aws.amazon.com/] ... having the WP et al is raw power and it'll be interesting to watch him use it... as for making money off it, someone asked J.P. Morgan what it cost to run his yacht. "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
ReplyDeletewhat Tom Foremski says...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/08/uncomfortable_facts_a.php