Romenesko: Bezos buys Washington Post for $250 million

Between this and Henry buying the Globe, I wonder if wealthy folks aren't seeing newspaper market values as having hit a bottom. For these prices, they won't have the debt burden that makes even marginal profitability so fatal to value. Hell, put it this way. Henry bought the Globe for $70 million. That's about the annual budget of one of his other investments, Roush Fenway Racing.

 

That's pretty good.

 

The low, low price must make the folks at the Big G cringe.

 

They are currently working on a piece arguing Bezos should have offered less.

 

Katherine does not look happy:

 

Well, in her defense, we've all seen how quickly the extra papers can start piling up in stacks around the house.

 

There are already hopeful noises coming out of the corner of 15th and L about Bezos as owner, compared with other possibilities. He is promising independence. He is, for now, keeping the leadership team in place (let's hope in particular that he keeps editor Marty Baron, under whose leadership the paper has been doing some notably hard-edged and influential journalism). His politics are not visibly objectionable. But let’s not kid ourselves here: The company that made him one of the richest men in the world has had a less than benign impact on our nation. It has devastated the publishing industry, from the big presses to the small booksellers. It has exacerbated the growth of the low-wage economy, to the point where the president feels the need to celebrate an increase in warehouse jobs that will pay barely more than minimum wage. (Fun fact uncovered by the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. two years ago: Instead of paying for air-conditioning at some Pennsylvania warehouses, Amazon had just stationed paramedics outside to take the inevitably heat-stressed workers to the hospital.)

More generally, Amazon has embodied, more than any other of the giants that rule our new landscape, the faster-cheaper-further mindset that scratches away daily at our communal fabric: Why bother running down to the store around the block if you can buy it with a click? No risk of running into someone on the way and actually having to talk to them, and hey, can you beat that price? No thought given to the externalities that make that price possible—the workers being violently shocked every time they pull a book off the warehouse shelf, or losing a chunk of their lunch break to go through the security checkpoint set up by their oh-so-trusting employer. They’re Somewhere Else, working for a company that is Out There, in the cloud.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114178/jeff-bezos-purchase-washington-post-bad-news#

 

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114178/jeff-bezos-purchase-washington-post-bad-news#

 

No, but the online version could be a perk of Prime Membership.

 

The Grahams will suddenly realize they're not on as many cocktail party invite lists.

 

Is this why Bezos bought the Post: