the Washington Post just announced that it has been sold to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire, for 250 million dollars in cash. this comes less than a week after the New York Times sold the Boston Globe for less than 40% of that amount.
Now it is not appropriate to sneer at a quarter of a billion dollars, but it would have been unthinkable ten years ago to value the Washington Post at such a low price. The Globe was sold then for 1.1 billion dollars, and the WaPo is worth a lot more even today. Sure, the purchase by Bezos gives the Post an owner that can afford to dump cash into the place to keep it running as its subscribers die off. Maybe Bezos can actually figure out a way to monetize the Post on the internet that makes sense and turns a profit. We shall see. Remember, it was just a few years ago that the Post sold Newsweek, one of the old standards of the magazine world which no longer even publishes a print edition. Will the WaPo soon loose its paper?
My prediction is that over the next ten to fifteen years, the Washington Post will stop printing. It will still gather news and sell it on some sort of electronic platform, but it will do so on a reduced scale from its present scope. Bezos will decide to sell the property to some other organization which will buy the name and the web site only.
You heard it here first! Okay, you heard it here!
Now it is not appropriate to sneer at a quarter of a billion dollars, but it would have been unthinkable ten years ago to value the Washington Post at such a low price. The Globe was sold then for 1.1 billion dollars, and the WaPo is worth a lot more even today. Sure, the purchase by Bezos gives the Post an owner that can afford to dump cash into the place to keep it running as its subscribers die off. Maybe Bezos can actually figure out a way to monetize the Post on the internet that makes sense and turns a profit. We shall see. Remember, it was just a few years ago that the Post sold Newsweek, one of the old standards of the magazine world which no longer even publishes a print edition. Will the WaPo soon loose its paper?
My prediction is that over the next ten to fifteen years, the Washington Post will stop printing. It will still gather news and sell it on some sort of electronic platform, but it will do so on a reduced scale from its present scope. Bezos will decide to sell the property to some other organization which will buy the name and the web site only.
You heard it here first! Okay, you heard it here!
No comments:
Post a Comment