The Washington Post Sold, End of Papers…
Nicole Younes
"The Grahams are selling the Post"; a shocking surprise that rocked the Washington Post itself two days ago.
250 million dollars was the price of the assets of the largest, oldest, and most influential American paper first published back in 1877.
The transaction was not done by the Amazon website, but presented to the CEO and founder of the website Jeff Bezos.
It is the week of papers' apocalypse, since this is the second sale after the Salzburg's sold the New York Times to Boston Globe for 70 million dollars, 25% less than its cost.
These two blows announced the beginning of the end of a prominent era that created genuine journalism.
This, in turn, will be a serious turning point after the gradual and unannounced stepping down of print transfers to digital technology.
The countdown for the Washington Post started with the decrease of ads and refrain from buying the paper printed edition. The Post's sales had decreased to around 475 thousand copies daily from 838 thousand copies, especially on Sundays, which is a 6.5% declination from previous years.
This exactly what the inventor Douglas Engelbart had forecasted when he said that the digital revolution had the most significant and deepest impact than writing or even typing. Media transfer from written to type to digital coincides with the broadening of the geographic patch of this media's influence from local to national to international.
Yes, the Washington Post's throne was sold, the second biggest paper that helped change US policies and helped form a mortifying force that determined the compass of the American political life. In its investigative articles, was the biggest scandal that the history of written journalism ever witnessed; The Watergate scandal back in 1972, which caused the then US President Richard Nixon to resign.
However, the digital world interfered with the magnetic compass and snatched the biggest element of strength from it: its readers, and thus was sold for a cheap price.
A specialist went far enough to say that the whole deal was a "charity" from Bezos, 49, who ranked 19th in the largest international wealth, according to Forbes.
The Post's prestigious journalistic role was not limited to its investigations that rocked America and the whole world, because the Washington Post always defended the right to publish and express from any kind of source and protect the source and journalists till the end.
Before Watergate, the history of journalism will not forget the Washington Post publishing secret documents from the Pentagon in 1971 on the Vietnam War, publicizing the frailness of the American government's lies and fabrications in the righteousness of the war back then to the global public opinion.
Also, in the recent case of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and his leaks on the wide scale surveillance of the NSA in the United States with the blessing of the government, this bold paper, in challenging authorities, was one of the papers that Snowden resorted to in publishing his dangerous documents.
Alas, challenging authorities cannot be met with the new challenges of the market, ever since the crisis reached its peak. Choices are conclusive: either go with the flow or diminish in a broad magnetic field. In other purely economic words; either fiscal loss - and it is noteworthy to mention here that the printed sector of the Washington Post recorded a loss in the first third of 2013 estimated at 49.3 million dollars because of what the Grahams described as the deteriorating economic situation of the print and publishing field - or sell to avoid loss.
Donald Graham, the former chairman of the paper, in a famous statement published two days ago, mentioned that "the point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for The Post."
The paper have other prints like "La Gazette", "Express", and "Southern Maryland", "Fairfax County Times," and "Greater Publishing Washington LLC".
Therefore, Bezos will become the exclusive owner of the paper by closing this sale.
He will change the institution's name, but will keep the paper's prestigious name and keep the staff, including the Editor in Chief Martin Baron and the General Manager Katharine Weymouth, who is also Donald Graham's niece.
Bezos had said that he understands the "critical role" that the Washington Post plays in the United States and promised that the Post's values won't change.
Source: al-Ahed News, translated by website team
