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Don Graham: Here’s Why My Family Just Sold The Washington Post, A Paper We’ve Owned For 80 Years; Bezos Outbid A Half-Dozen and was deemed the “highest and best”

Don Graham: Here’s Why My Family Just Sold The Washington Post, A Paper We’ve Owned For 80 Years

ALYSON SHONTELL AUG. 5, 2013, 5:22 PM 2,648 1

Don Graham, former owner of The Washington Post, wrote a letter to the paper’s employees about his family’s tough decision to sell the news property they’ve owned for 80 years. Here it is, below:

All,

I have a most surprising announcement. Our company is making it public right now that we have sold The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. To be clear, the buyer is not Amazon, but a company owned by Jeff personally. The price is $250 million and what we are selling includes the weekly papers called for shorthand The Gazettes and Robinson Terminal… This leaves me with two questions: why are we selling and why to Jeff? The first question is much the harder. All the Grahams in this room have been proud to know since we were very little that we were part of the family that owned The Washington Post. We have loved the paper, what it stood for, and those who produced it. But the point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for the Post. As the newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we have no answers, Katharine and I began to ask ourselves if our small public company was still the best home for the newspaper. Our revenues had declined seven years in a row. We had innovated and to my critical eye our innovations had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn’t made up for the revenue decline. Our answer had to be cost cuts and we knew there was a limit to that. We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed.

Don  Read more of this post

Accounting For Pensions, The Boston Globe Sold For Negative $40 Million, 20 Years After Selling For $1.1 Billion

Accounting For Pensions, The Boston Globe Sold For Negative $40 Million, 20 Years After Selling For $1.1 Billion

MATTHEW YGLESIAS, SLATE AUG. 5, 2013, 8:26 AM 1,306 4

Like everyone else I’ve seen the headlines remarking on the fact that a New York Times Company which bought The Boston Globe for over a billion dollars is selling it this weekend for just $70 million. But if you read the body text of those articles you’ll see that the paper actually sold for much less than $70 million. It in fact sold for a negative quantity of money. That’s because the terms under which John Henry is buying the paper stick the New York Times Company with the Globe‘s pension obligations, which are said to amount to around $110 million. Which is to say that the worth of the overall Globe enterprise is negative $40 million, not $70 million. That’s shocking. What’s even more shocking is that the Globe has been doing great journalism—winning Pulitzers, etc.—and even turning a modest profit. But that’s the difference between a growing industry (where Tumblr can sell for $1 billion with no profits or even meaningful revenue in sight) and a shrinking one.

Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead In 20 Years

Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead In 20 Years

GREGORY FERENSTEIN

posted 8 hours ago

Before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million, he had some choice words for the ailing print news industry. In a wide-ranging interview with the German paper, Berliner-Zeitung, the newly-minted media mogul said at the time that no one would bother paying for news online and print would be dead in 20 years (translation from our awesome writer, Frederic Lardinois). “There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service. Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.” said Bezos. That’s a pretty long timeline (think what happened in technology since 1993), but it does given an indication that Bezos may pressure his new newspaper to accelerate abandonment of their print version. Read more of this post

3D printing reaches tipping point; 3D printing was used in the Melbourne production of King Kong

3D printing reaches tipping point

August 1, 2013

Larissa Ham

Once cost-prohibitive, 3D printing is now affordable and becoming mainstream.

3D printing was used in the Melbourne production of King Kong. Photo: Photo by James Morgan/Global Creatures

He’s now a mammoth, six-metre-high gorilla pounding the boards at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre, but the latest version of King Kong had his features fine-tuned inside a small 3D printer. “There was a lot of debate about how he was going to look – not only his body but his face as well,” says Domenic Di Giorgio, head of digital design at The Creature Technology Company. “He had to convey so much emotion during the performance.” In the past, the West Melbourne business fashioned its maquettes – or small models – from clay, laboriously changing small details until it finally got the design right. However, thanks to the growing quality and affordability of 3D printers, designers are able to tinker with countless iterations of their creatures. Read more of this post

Taxi apps are gaining traction in everywhere but Indonesia. Why is that so?

Why is there a lack of taxi apps in Indonesia?

DailySocial 5, Aug 2013Indonesia 

Taxi apps are gaining traction in everywhere but Indonesia. Why is that so?

The proliferation of taxi apps and private car hire services around the world is inevitable with companies such as Uber, Lyft, Hailo, EasyTaxi, GetTaxi, and myTaxi leading the charge. With these apps making their ways into cities across the world, Indonesia is one of the countries which have yet to see serious play by these apps and services.

The taxi industry in Indonesia is not very tightly regulated as it may be in many other countries. Cab drivers easily come and go and they easily switch not only between taxi companies but also outside of the industry. Unlike in other territories, there is no such thing as a medallion, certificate, or specific license that drivers need to apply for or purchase. Anyone with a driver’s license for a car can walk in to a cab company and apply to be a driver. Read more of this post

Memebox is Korea’s no. 1 beauty subscription commerce service that provides its customers with five to six beauty items every month for a nominal monthly fee of US$15; next stop: Thailand

Beauty curation service Memebox dominates Korea, next stop: Thailand

beSUCCESS 3, Aug 2013Asia 

With positive feedback from its home market in South Korea beauty curation service Memebox seeks global growth, starting from Southeast Asia.

Memebox is Korea’s no. 1 beauty subscription commerce service that provides its customers with five to six beauty items every month for a nominal monthly fee of US$15. Memebox aims to deliver the most exciting beauty experience to consumers in a one-stop service for beauty shopping. Now they are looking to expand their sights beyond the borders of their home country and establish themselves globally, starting first by entering the Southeast Asian market. Read more of this post

Chinese mobile chat app WeChat’s first operator deal Weixin Woka SIM card attracts 700,000 customers within 24 hours

Chinese mobile chat app WeChat’s first operator deal attracts 700,000 customers within 24 hours

By Kaylene Hong, 3 hours ago, 05:33am

China Unicom’s joint SIM card collaboration with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which includes an independent data package for its messaging service WeChat (known as Weixin in China), has received overwhelming response on the first day that pre-orders were opened to the public. A Techweb report notes that more than 700,000 users have already placed their orders for the SIM card, called Weixin Woka, by local time 10pm on August 5. The company started accepting pre-orders at midnight. Read more of this post

Specialized newsrooms abuzz on WeChat

Specialized newsrooms abuzz on WeChat

English.news.cn   2013-08-06

BEIJING, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) — Lu Jiuping starts working at 4 a.m. every day, but the retired 50-year-old businessman has never made a cent from his current occupation. He starts his day by reading several financial websites, picking out valuable bits of business or IT news. Not satisfied to digest the information alone, he posts these news items in “Tearoom 90,” an official account he registered on WeChat, a popular mobile social networking platform developed by Chinese IT giant Tencent. Since it was set up in February, Lu’s free subscriber service has attracted a readership of over 14,000, quickly turning it from a “tearoom” to a “newsroom,” much to the delight of the amateur media strategist. “I am working as the chief editor of an e-magazine,” Lu said. The Official Account is one built-in WeChat function that offers broadcast messaging. Operators of each account can share anything in any format with their subscribers and receive instant feedback. Read more of this post

Tencent Commercializes WeChat to Tap Mobile Users’ Pocket

Tencent Commercializes WeChat to Tap Mobile Users’ Pocket

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) –Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700), China’s biggest Internet company, yesterday began allowing its WeChat users to make online payments, less than a week after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. said it blocked the messaging app.

Users in mainland China — which excludes Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan — can buy goods and games from some WeChat accounts, said Jerry Huang, an investor relations director for Tencent in Shenzhen. Accounts abroad will be limited to buying animation stickers, he said. WeChat has more than 300 million users with more than 70 million registered outside of mainland China. Read more of this post

IBM Gets Allies to Chip Away at Intel; Google, Others Join Effort to Break Big Blue’s Power Designs Out of a Niche

August 5, 2013, 8:35 p.m. ET

IBM Gets Allies to Chip Away at Intel

Google, Others Join Effort to Break Big Blue’s Power Designs Out of a Niche

DON CLARK

International Business Machines Corp. IBM +0.17% has enlisted Google Inc.GOOG -0.17% and some other high-tech allies for a collective effort to catapult an IBM chip technology out of a shrinking niche. The alliance the companies plan to announce Tuesday would allow many companies to license IBM microprocessor designs—based on a technology dubbed Power—that are now only found in Big Blue’s own server systems. Licensees could incorporate IBM-designed circuitry in their own chips, with members of the alliance working on related products such as servers, networking and storage devices, participants said. Read more of this post

Mobile Game Developers Enjoy Win Streak, but Analysts Are Skeptical

08.05.2013 16:34

Mobile Game Developers Enjoy Win Streak, but Analysts Are Skeptical

Profits are up, investors are keen and acquisitions are plentiful, but experts say the good times have to end some time

Liu Ran and Zheng Fei

(Beijing) – The country’s mobile game industry is sizzling hot with cash from investors apparently undaunted by analysts’ warnings that the business is volatile and may be overvalued. Rarely can a startup company in any other industry make a profit in its first year, an investment banker said. In the mobile game sector, however, this is common. He said one company he recently visited was set up in 2011. It turned in a profit that year, and in the next its earnings hit 40 million yuan. Read more of this post

China handsets take 20% of global smartphone sales

August 5, 2013 7:06 pm

China handsets take 20% of global smartphone sales

By Danie Thomas, Telecoms Correspondent

Surging sales of cut-price smartphones mass produced in China has meant that the country’s handset makers now account for about a fifth of global branded sales. Companies that few people know outside China, such as Yulong, which makes Coolpad devices, and Xiaomi, have soared in the past year, according to Canalys, the global research group.

Yulong, along with Chinese rival Lenovo, has entered the top five of global handset makers for the first time,pushing out better known Western names such asNokia and BlackBerry that once dominated the market. Along with Huawei, ZTE and Xiaomi, these Chinese companies make up a fifth of the total branded smartphone market, up from less than 15 per cent a year ago. Read more of this post