The acquisition of "Washington Post", good and bad news

boss of retail giant Amazon online is offered Washington Post and titles of the same group ( Slate Foreign Policy , Express , The Gazette Newspapers, El Tiempo Latino , etc..) for $ 250 million. Jeff Bezos, a visionary controversial because it would have killed the markets it has invested to dominate best, offered a jewel in the American press, with its 135 years of revelations and journalistic rigor. The man is known to have transformed the book market, but its activity is now being extended to other areas, including the conquest of space with the Blue Origin project. The atmosphere was described as “sluggish” and “disillusioned” Monday night by journalists in writing.

Recently, Washington Post was one of the spearheads of the revelations of Prism, the monitoring program users worldwide by the United States. But he is most famous for having revealed the first Watergate scandal, which caused the resignation of President Nixon in 1974. However, profitability is difficult to find for the media group, which lost tens of millions of dollars in 2012. The 19th World fortune is a support of choice, it is in any case the point made by Donald Graham, the last representative of the Meyer family who had bought the newspaper auction in 1933. “Nobody in this room should not be sad, except for me,” he wrote in a statement read to daily teams Monday night.

redemption monitor

great opponent Post seems to get a little better. New York Times , which had blown for example politeness to reveal the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, discussed earlier the shift to a digital model. Results for the second quarter of 2013 are contrasted: if sales increase, sales fell. The good news is the increase of digital subscriptions: + 40% in one year, or 700,000 subscribers.

The selling price of Washington Post , $ 250 million is very low, but is the air. A few days ago, the New York Times separated for 70 million dollars Boston Globe , a lighthouse as he had bought $ 1.1 billion in 1993. During the golden years of the release paper, Post posted 832,000 subscribers to the printed version (the only one at the time), against 474,000 today.

This acquisition is subject to controversy, as operated by a personality often hated in the world of publishing. However, as noted New York Times , it is worth at least one way: it is the first acquisition of a major title release by an expert in the digital economy, and not by an “old businessman” in the middle.