By Eric Bovim
A man leaves the Washington Post building after the announced sale of the newspaper August 5, 2013 in Washington, DC. The Graham family has agreed to sell the flagship newspaper for $ 250 million to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Way up the Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas resides the prototype of a colossal, near-eternal clock, meant to survive 100 centuries of commerce and politics, the dream of a former Disney imagineer, Danny Hillis.
The clock of the long now—that’s actually what it’s called—may have spawned from Hillis. But the money to build it has come from Jeff Bezos.
If it’s still ticking 10,000 years from now, it’s hard to know which of Bezos’ investments will have made the greatest impact on civilization. There is of course his famous e-commerce site, Amazon.com, and this oddball, $ 42 million clock in the desert. He also sunk millions, if not billions into Blue Origin, a space exploration company that aims to put millions of humans into colonies and amusement parks that orbit the earth.
Then there is his newest investment, The Washington Post.
If I were a betting man, I would put money behind the notion that the venerable Post, even after Bezos bought it last week, has approximately 10,000 days (27.39 years) left to live —and that’s being quite generous. “Cockamamie?”
The vultures have been circling the Post for some time, as the gangrene of declining circulation and vanishing ad revenue has climbed up every limb of the paper. The newspaper division of the Post, including other component divisions being purchased by Bezos, experienced a loss of nearly $ 15 million last quarter; the death stench is pervasive. “I am not even sure if this paper will be around in a year!” a Post reporter told me last month, confessing his desire to exit his once noble profession before it’s too late.
Since 2000, print journalism has been facing its own mortality. Each passing month is another chapter in a death foretold. In May, the Chicago Sun Times axed its entire photojournalism staff, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, in favor of freelancers. Before Bezos’ big buy, the New York Times divested itself of the Boston Globe, racking up a 93% loss on the deal after buying the paper a couple decades earlier for $ 1.1 billion.
Newspaper owners were too slow to recognize that their business models were quick sand. The “non-decisions” by owners have been astounding. For example, it took the Washington Post until 2013 to launch a video unit to keep with the times.
Don Graham, the man who sold the Post to Bezos for $ 250 million cash, is well known as a good-hearted steward of the paper, but hardly a risk taker. He famously turned down an opportunity to become a private investor in Facebook Facebook back in 2005.
With Bezos now at the helm, the post-mortem on why he made the deal has been puzzling, if not misguided. Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate who used his Facebook fortune to buy another print media artifact, The New Republic, penned an outrageous elegy following the Post acquisition:
“I’m guessing that Bezos understands an old truism: brands matter. The wonder and magic of institutions like the Post or The New Republic is their history-their stories track the American story…In fact, brands matter more now than when Don Graham’s grandfather bought the Post nearly a hundred years ago…”
The brand is not enough.
Surely the former staffs of Lehman Brothers (and Bear Stearns), TWA, and The Saturday Evening Post could tell you that. Newsweek, also sold by Graham in 2010, ceased to exist as a print magazine in the same year. There have been few success stories in recent years of big media brands embracing technology to preserve their brands. Rupert Murdoch’s controversial decision to erect a “paywall” for the Wall Street Journal, maligned at the time, stands out as one fine example of siphoning new online revenue through paid subscribers.
The story of Encyclopedia Britannica is a blueprint for the future of print media. Confronted with plummeting sales, the 244 year old product stopped printing in 2012. Jorge Cauz, the brave Brazilian President of Britannica who made this decision, understood that it was a choice between innovation or annihilation. “[We] really didn’t have enough time to change its business model, because it was just impossible. We could not continue to print an icon. We needed to get on with the times,” he told Harvard Business Review in February, 2012.
Futurist that he is, Bezos surely understands this principle. Perhaps he intends to resuscitate a wheezing enterprise, or at least reposition it to keep pace with its cocky, younger step-brother, Politico.
Or is it vital to him that the Post survive as a print entity?
Perhaps his newest acquisition is just another piece of curio for the parlor. Very rich people sometimes do what one might deem odd things with their fortunes, though there’s perhaps reason to at least hope this commerical visionary sees something we don’t.
Still, even money has its limits. After all, one day that dessert clock will stop ticking.
Eric Bovim is Managing Director at McBee Strategic, and advisory firm based in Washington, D.C. (@bovim)
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