Media Legacies For Sale

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos starts his High Order Bit presentation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thanks to your generous contributions to an online website that sells just about everything from fashion to Kindles, you have helped enable the founder of Amazon.com to become the proud new owner of a newspaper that once helped to bring down a President of the United States.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, plunked down a reported $250 million to buy the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned the newspaper for decades.  The Post is best known for its coverage of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, which forced President Richard Nixon to resign and elevated reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into journalistic icon status.

But that was 40 years ago.  Today the Post, like every other mainstream news organization, is struggling to remain relevant in the digital age.  Some newspapers have done nothing but subtract staff and limit the days they do publish.  Others just quit printing altogether and go exclusively online, making the newspaper on your doorstep even more quaint.

Bezos is not the first high-profile business figure who still believes in newspapers, and may not be the last.  John Henry, who owns baseball's Boston Red Sox, bought the Boston Globe from the New York Times Company for $70 million.  Warren Buffett owns a few papers, including the ones in Buffalo and Omaha.  And the Koch brothers are reportedly interested in taking over the Tribune Company's newspapers in Chicago, Baltimore and Los Angeles.  That's quite a change from the anonymous private equity groups who currently run papers such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

It's too early to say what Bezos has in mind for the Post, except that it will be run separately from Amazon.  Will he improve on the paper's legacy or trash it?  Being in the seat of national power, will he use the Post to advance his views on business and politics?  And, less seriously, will Amazon Prime customers get a special deal on Post subscriptions if they buy a Kindle Fire?

This is one of several deals involving media companies that have taken place in the last few weeks.  Here are some others:

• Newsweek, which is now a digital magazine, has its third different owner since the Post's former parent company sold them in 2010.  This time it's IJT, which bought the brand from the Daily Beast.  If Tina Brown couldn't do anything with Newsweek, what makes IJT believe they could do better?
• In broadcast TV, Gannett--the owners of KARE-11 and USA Today--bought up the Belo Corporation and its stations in Seattle, Phoenix, St. Louis and Dallas.  Tribune purchased Local TV and its roster of stations.  But the biggest concern is Sinclair, the owners of WUCW (Channel 23) in the Twin Cities.  They purchased the Albritton and Fisher stations, which include WJLA in Washington, D.C. and KOMO in Seattle.  Progressives in particular are worried that Sinclair's cookie-cutter local news formats and conservative views are going to be shoved down viewers' throats.
• Let's not forget radio.  The House of Hubbard (KSTP, 1500 ESPN, KS95 and MyTalk 107.1) expanded its profile to the West by buying the Sandusky radio stations in Seattle and Phoenix, to go along with the ones they bought from Bonneville last year.

There will be the usual complaints about how so much media is concentrated in so few hands.  But when companies and individuals are willing to invest their money in media that may have seen better days, it's quite a gamble.  We'll soon see whether that gamble pays off or not.