March 28, 2024

Amazon’s Founder to Buy The Washington Post

Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff about the sale late Monday afternoon. They had gathered together in the newspaper’s auditorium at the behest of the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, his niece.

“I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders),” Mr. Graham said in a statement.

In the auditorium, he closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad — except, he said, “for me.”

The announcement was greeted by what many staff members described as “shock,” a reaction shared in newsrooms across the country as one of the crown jewels of newspapers was surrendered by one of the industry’s royal families.

In Mr. Bezos, The Post will have a very different owner, a technologist whose fortunes have risen in the last dozen years even as those of The Post and most newspapers have struggled. Through Amazon, the retailing giant, he has helped revolutionize the way people around the world consume — first books, then expanding to all kinds of goods and more recently in online storage, electronic books and online video, including a recent spate of original programming.

In the meeting, Mr. Graham stressed that Mr. Bezos would purchase The Post in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Amazon the company. The $250 million deal includes all of the publishing businesses owned by The Washington Post Company, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.

The Washington Post company plans to hold on to Slate magazine, The Root.com and Foreign Policy. According to the release, Mr. Bezos has asked Ms. Weymouth to remain at The Post along with Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager; Martin Baron, executive editor; and Fred Hiatt, editor of the editorial page.

Mr. Bezos, who did not attend the meeting at The Post on Monday, said in a statement that he had known Mr. Graham for the past decade and said about Mr. Graham that “I do not know a finer man.” Ms. Weymouth said that in negotiating this deal, Mr. Bezos made it clear he was not purely focused on profits.

The sale, at a price that would have been unthinkably low even a few years ago, represents the end of eight decades of ownership by the Graham family of The Post since Eugene Meyer bought The Post at auction on June 1, 1933. His son-in-law Phillip L. Graham served as president of the paper from 1947 until his death in 1963. Then Graham’s widow, Katharine Graham, oversaw the paper through the publication of the Pentagon Papers alongside The New York Times and its coverage of Watergate, the political scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and also a starring role for the newspaper in the film, “All The President’s Men.”

The Post’s daily circulation peaked in 1993 with 832,332 average daily subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But like most newspapers, it has suffered greatly from circulation and advertising declines. By March, the newspaper’s daily circulation had dropped to 474,767.

The company became pressed enough for cash that Ms. Weymouth announced in February that it was looking to sell its flagship headquarters. According to a regulatory filing associated with the sale, Mr. Bezos will pay rent to The Post Company on the space for up to three years.

Michael D. Shear, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of the founder of Amazon.com. He is Jeffrey P. Bezos, not Jeffrey K.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/media/amazoncom-founder-to-buy-the-washington-post.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

British News Media Agree to More Powerful Regulator

But the editors, meeting over breakfast at a London restaurant, steered a careful course, embracing most but not all of the measures recommended in a report last week by a high-ranking judge, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson. They rejected the judge’s most contentious proposal, for a new law that would put teeth into a state-sanctioned system of oversight.

That placed the editors broadly in line with the approach taken by Mr. Cameron, who has courted political opprobrium, particularly on the left, by saying that writing any part of a new regulatory system into law would risk eroding 300 years of press freedom in Britain. Reacting to the Leveson report last Thursday, the prime minister warned that once such a law existed, politicians would be tempted to broaden it, and start the country down the road to state control of the press.

Lord Justice Leveson led a nine-month inquiry into a scandal surrounding abusive and illegal newspaper practices, including hacking into private computers and voice mail and bribing police officers and other public officials to obtain confidential information — practices that appeared to have been rife in some newsrooms.

The Leveson inquiry and the parallel investigations by the police have focused especially on two mass-circulation tabloids that anchored Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain, The Sun and The News of the World. The company shut down The News of the World in July 2011, at the height of the scandal.

In effect, some analysts said, the editors’ agreement reflects the price that Britain’s famously freewheeling newspapers are now paying for the tabloid papers’ excesses.

Though Britain has no formal equivalent of the First Amendment, its tabloid newspapers in particular have prided themselves on being the scourge of the establishment, of privilege and of claims to a right of privacy by celebrities and others in the news. That attitude could now be curbed, perhaps even radically, by a new regulatory body responding to the public outrage stirred by the recent scandals, these analysts said.

The newspaper The Guardian reported on its Web site on Wednesday that the editors — including representatives of the sensationalist “red top” tabloids like The Sun, the country’s most lucrative daily — had endorsed 40 of the 47 principal recommendations made in Lord Justice Leveson’s 2,000-page report.

They agreed to scrap the weak and widely discredited Press Complaints Commission, set up by newspaper barons 20 years ago, and replace it with a new body appointed from outside the newspaper industry and the government. It would have a much larger budget, a strong investigative staff, and the power to order errant newspapers to publish prominent apologies and pay fines up to £1 million, or $1.6 million, or 1 percent of a publication’s annual revenue, whichever is less. Effectively, subscribing to the new system would be compulsory, since failure to sign up would deny newspapers access to a new system for arbitrating libel suits that could be far cheaper than fighting suits in the courts.

“We endorsed virtually all the report, barring the clauses that dealt with statutory underpinning,” one of the editors who attended Wednesday’s meeting said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an agreement among the roughly 20 editors not to comment individually on the record while details of a new system are being worked out.

Newspapers represented at the meeting included broadsheets like The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and two Murdoch-owned titles, The Times and The Sunday Times; two weekly journals, The Spectator and The Economist; and mass-market tabloids like The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express and Mr. Murdoch’s Sun, with readerships in the millions.

The editor who spoke said that the group voted clause by clause on the 47 Leveson recommendations in a 90-minute meeting marked by a sense of urgency because of the mounting political pressure for tougher measures to rein in the newspapers. “There was a feeling that if we were to avoid something nasty, we had to do something quickly,” he said.

On the political left and center-left, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are pressing for a statute that would put the newspapers on notice that they would defy the new system at their peril. With his own Conservative Party deeply split on the issue, Mr. Cameron told the editors at a meeting on Tuesday that they should endorse the principles behind the Leveson proposals, and that if they did not, they would “get a statute,” an editor who was present said.

With the editors now in line, senior aides to Mr. Cameron have said they will try to defuse the situation with a more detailed blueprint for an oversight system that would be independent but not depend on statutory backing, perhaps with a senior judge to act as a referee on appointments to the new regulatory body and on contested findings.

The editors’ action put newspapers with a combined daily and weekend circulation of more than eight million copies — said to be read by more than one-third of Britain’s population of 62 million — on record in favor of substantially toughening the system of self-regulation by the newspapers that has been in place since 1953.

In its current form, set up in 1991 after an earlier threat of government regulation, a voluntary body passes judgment on accusations of wrongdoing by the newspapers that participate. But critics who testified before the Leveson inquiry, including victims of the tabloid excesses, said the commission has been too pliant, especially in dealing with rambunctious tabloids like The Sun, which have had little to fear from the commission’s reproaches.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 6, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the jurisdiction of a proposed independent regulator in Britain. The new regulator would oversee newspapers, not of the broader news media.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/europe/british-newspapers-agree-to-more-powerful-regulator.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A Rift Divides Members of Journalism Groups

As the National Association of Black Journalists opens its annual conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, a topic of conversation is likely to be its recent efforts to get more black anchors on prime-time news programs.

But another issue may form a larger backdrop — the association’s decision to end its alliance with three other minority journalist groups after nearly 20 years.

The rift between N.A.B.J. and the Unity: Journalists of Color coalition comes as the number of minorities in newsrooms across the country has declined for the third consecutive year.

When the association joined Unity in the early 1990s, its goal — along with the other members, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association — was to make newsrooms and reporting more inclusive. The highlight of the alliance is the Unity: Journalists of Color conference, which brings the groups together every four years.

This year, a debate erupted between board members from N.A.B.J. and Unity over how much revenue N.A.B.J. and other member organizations should receive as a result of the conference. N.A.B.J. members also questioned the need for Unity as a stand-alone organization and whether it was using its revenue to effectively support minority journalists.

Unable to reach an agreement, N.A.B.J. withdrew from the 2012 Unity conference in April and announced last week that it would hold its own conference in New Orleans in June. That decision has left some N.A.B.J. members divided over how and why it was made and what they will do next year.

“I know that there are issues, but be that as it may, it seems to me that this is not the time to walk away from being a united front,” said Callie Crossley, an N.A.B.J. member, seminar program manager at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the host of “The Callie Crossley Show” on WGBH radio. “To me it’s not clear how we come out better in the financial end.”

“I’m deeply disappointed that what we worked so hard to put together is coming apart,” said Walt Swanston, a diversity consultant and former executive director of N.A.B.J. from 1993 to 1994 and for Unity from 1997 to 1998.

Lynne K. Adrine, an N.A.B.J. member and the director of the graduate program for broadcast and digital journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, said she was disappointed that N.A.B.J. had pulled out of the Unity conference. But she said she understood that the organization had to “exercise a certain amount of fiscal responsibility, especially during these trying financial times.”

N.A.B.J. representatives have responded to their members’ concerns by explaining that by leaving Unity, the group will keep its sponsorships secure and continue to earn money on its own that can be put toward programming for its members.

“We expected people to feel torn about it,” said Kathy Y. Times, the president of N.A.B.J. “At the end of the day, the board is an elected body and weighed months of negotiations to make sure that N.A.B.J. was meeting the needs of our members.”

Like other member organizations, N.A.B.J. has struggled over the last decade to balance its support of annual conferences and professional enrichment programs with a decline in financial support from media companies suffering from sharp advertising losses. In 2001, as part of an effort to broaden its sponsorship base, the group lifted a long-held ban on financing from the makers of alcoholic beverages and began accepting more nonmedia sponsors.

Maurice Foster, the executive director of N.A.B.J., said the group had been in contact with convention sponsors who said they would support the N.A.B.J. conference in 2012. Many sponsors considered the Unity conference “a matter of convenience,” Mr. Foster said, since it allowed them to reach many organizations in one location. “Every other year, they were prepared to go to four places,” he added.

Unity representatives, however, said the alliance continued to play a critical role in representing minority journalists. Onica Makwakwa, the executive director for Unity, said the coalition earned nearly $1 million during the 2008 convention, has since conducted multiple research projects and supported public policy issues affecting minorities.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=99724c9fbd631eda719ebbd9973e4c96