|
|
|
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »
In late 2012, Donald E. Graham, the chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, met with the paper’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, to look at the paper’s future for the next three years. Their assessment troubled them.
“We knew we could survive, but we always felt that our ownership should do more than help the paper survive,†Mr. Graham said in an interview Monday evening.
With the agreement of the board, the company retained Allen & Company and had an initial round of discussions with six potential buyers. Then in July, at Allen’s annual Sun Valley conference, Mr. Graham met with one of them, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Mr. Graham liked what he heard.
So after 80 years of control and editorial leadership by the Graham family, The Post began to change ownership Monday, when Mr. Bezos agreed to buy it for $250 million.
The sale, when it is completed, will end the special relationship the paper has had with the nation’s capital. Washington has been through all manner of tumult and change in the last eight decades, with years of racial strife, the resignation of a president, a terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the evaporation of a bipartisan political process.
But through it all, The Washington Post has been a source of both constancy and coverage, a center of gravity and a force in the civic, social and cultural life of a city where many others came and went.
“It is a very big Washington moment,†said David Gergen, who was involved in four presidential administrations.
“When Kay Graham had you to her house, it was a command performance,†Mr. Gergen added, referring to Mr. Graham’s mother, the paper’s leader for more than two decades. “It was one of the last places where people with very different agendas would set down their weapons and come to talk. That has been disappearing for a long time, but symbolically, this brings an end to that era.â€
To many, the Washington that the newspaper once guided from family dinners and select Georgetown salons disappeared long before the sale. The rise of the Web site Politico â€" built by people trained and nurtured at The Washington Post â€" and other insurgents foretold a change in the order of things. The days when people snapped open the daily paper to find out the things they should care about were long past, replaced by a cacophony of information sources, many of them far more driven by ideology than The Washington Post.
 In that way, perhaps, the purchase of one of the prized assets of American journalism by a talented entrepreneur from another coast is less of a shock than it might have been.
In selling to Mr. Bezos, the Grahams left the Sulzbergers, the owners of The New York Times, as the last family standing in a club that once also included the Chandlers (Los Angeles Times), the Copleys (San Diego Tribune), the Cowles (Minneapolis Star Tribune), and the Bancrofts (Wall Street Journal). But even as those other families sold out to moneyed interests, it always seemed a safe assumption that the Grahams would continue to find a way to exercise a certain kind of stewardship over Washington.
The Grahams’ resolve to retain ownership was wilted by an industrial sea change that laid many newspapers low. And even as the rest of the industry decided that there was an urgent need to begin charging on the Web, The Post held out, only recently deciding to join the rest.
For a time, the newspaper was propped up by its education division, Kaplan Inc., but when that company encountered regulatory and business turbulence, the losses at the newspaper â€" revenue dropped 44 percent over the past six years â€" came into sharp focus.
Still, news of the sale and who was buying it was an extraordinary development in the newspaper industry. Given that The Post still has potency as a political symbol, the fact that it could be acquired by a man who made his fortune taking apart book-publishing â€" another traditional business â€" served as more evidence that the power center in the media world has turned away from the East Coast.
Technology and its leaders have proved time and again that they can set an agenda based on giving consumers what they want, not what some politician, or a newspaper, thinks they need.
Perhaps  the biggest surprise in the sale is that it happened under the watch of Donald Graham. All scions of industry do their time on the shop-room floor, but Mr. Graham had shown that he didn’t want to just inherit his enterprise, he wanted to earn it. He served in Vietnam and later joined the Washington police force to walk a beat before doing his stations in the Post newsroom and on the business side.
He was perhaps not the legend that his mother was, but to many he represented a certain kind of stubborn belief that good newspapering was its own end. In the popular imagination, journalism reached its highest and best calling during Watergate, when The Post and its determined owner, Ms. Graham, took on a sitting president.
The idea that Mr. Graham would sell the paper, whatever merits the sale might entail, seemed as unlikely as Henry V giving up the crown.
But on Monday, Mr. Graham seemed at peace with what he had done.
As he rode down in the elevator to the newsroom for the announcement, some of the paper’s reporters rode with him. One asked: “Is this bad?†Mr. Graham shook his head, saying that, in the end, he thought it would be good news for the paper.
“It was clear to me that he wanted to buy the newspaper for the right reasons,†Mr. Graham said of Mr. Bezos, “that he understood what newspapers do and why this newspaper in particular is important and that he would be willing to stand up for it.â€
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Washington Post Reaches the End of the Graham Era.
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »
Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »
Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »
FOR an advertising campaign that aims to appeal to women from 18 to 25, Sexy Hair, the hair care brand, did not hire a celebrity spokeswoman within that age bracket like Selena Gomez or Emma Watson. Rather, the brand is featuring an actress who, had she not died in 1962, would be 87 today: Marilyn Monroe.
A new campaign â€" with the slogan “Styles change. Sexy is forever.†â€" features photos of Monroe with quotations from her. “If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere,†she says in one ad. In another, “In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo.â€
The campaign, which is by Yard in New York, will be introduced on Aug. 22 and will appear in magazines including Cosmopolitan, InStyle and Allure, and on billboards and online. Sexy Hair, which was introduced in 1999, is available primarily in salons, and before this campaign had been advertised primarily in trade publications.
Diamonds may be, as Monroe sang in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,†a girl’s best friend, but these days marketers are thinking of her in the friendliest of terms, too.
In March, Macy’s introduced its Marilyn Monroe collection, a clothing line that, according to the department store chain, is meant to appeal primarily to teenagers and young women from 13 to 22.
Also introduced in March was Three Olives Marilyn Monroe Strawberry Vodka, with a label featuring the classic image of the star standing over a subway grate, her pleated white dress billowing.
A line of Marilyn Monroe shoes will be introduced by the Will Rich brand in September.
Ruth Bernstein, chief strategy officer at Yard, said that it was integral to the campaign for Sexy Hair to include Monroe’s quotations, which are from published interviews.
“We wanted to bring out not only Marilyn’s timeless glamour but also her smarts and wit,†Ms. Bernstein said. “We are understanding her more and more as a trailblazer.â€
According to Q Scores, which tracks the popularity of living and deceased celebrities, 96 percent of respondents know who Monroe is and, among them, 25 percent rate her as one of their favorite celebrities. That means she has what the company calls a Q Score of 25.
While awareness of Monroe is near the top of the 147 deceased celebrities the company tracks, her Q Score is only slightly above the average, which is 23.
At the top of the list is Lucille Ball, with a 97 percent awareness level and a 53 Q Score, followed by John Wayne, with a 96 percent awareness level and 46 Q Score, and Bob Hope, with a 94 percent awareness level and 46 Q Score.
Monroe, whose estate was acquired by the Authentic Brands Group in 2010, has a significant presence on social media, with more than 7.3 million followers on her official Facebook page and more than 153,000 followers on Twitter.
The Facebook page, which is administered by Authentic Brands, frequently promotes license holders, like a Marilyn Monroe beach towel line at Bed Bath & Beyond, the Macy’s clothing collection, and the Marilyn Monroe Café, which opened in 2012 in Oakville, Ontario, with the aim of duplicating the concept with franchisees.
When it comes to endorsement deals involving dead celebrities, or “delebs,†a portmanteau word popular with marketers, brands weigh factors similar to those they consider regarding the living.
“It has to be a good fit for both the brand and the deceased celebrity, as it does with living celebrities,†said Lisa Soboslai, a senior director at Corbis Entertainment who manages its GreenLight division. Along with representing the estates of figures like Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Steve McQueen and Charlie Chaplin, GreenLight brokers deals between brands and estates it does not represent.
GreenLight has worked with Mazda, the automotive brand, to feature Thomas Edison in a television commercial, with BMW to feature Albert Einstein in a commercial and with Wells Fargo to feature Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Advertisers with limited budgets can find deceased celebrities appealing.
“It’s a little more cost-effective, since even a Steve McQueen or a James Dean is going to be less expensive than an A-list celebrity,†Ms. Soboslai said.
And more predictable.
“You know she’s not going to be stumbling down on the set or getting arrested,†said Jennifer Weiderman, vice president for marketing and education at Sexy Hair, referring to using Monroe rather than a living celebrity. “That’s not the reason we chose her, which is because she’s sexy, smart, sassy and iconic â€" but it’s important.â€
Nick Woodhouse, the president of Authentic Brands, says he turns down many pitches for deals to use Monroe.
“I’ve had requests for painkillers,†Mr. Woodhouse said. He said he considered such requests in poor taste because a barbiturate overdose was ruled the cause of Monroe’s death.
Because she was what Mr. Woodhouse called “the original sex symbol,†he says it is understandable that he fields proposals from manufacturers of products of a sexual nature, but he rejects those, too â€" at least for now.
“It’s not like that’s a taboo subject, and I’m not ruling it out,†he said. “But it just doesn’t work for us at this time.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Marilyn Monroe’s Star Still Shines in Ad Campaigns .
SEATTLE â€" The Washington of Jeffrey P. Bezos has been the one of disruptive technology, fleece jackets and software engineers. He has shown little interest in the Washington of politics, power suits and Woodward and Bernstein.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief of Amazon.com, who could be feeding an desire to reinvent venerable industries.
Yet now, from his tech frontier in Seattle, Mr. Bezos has bridged those far-flung worlds by buying The Washington Post.
The purchase price of $250 million is a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion. But the deal was still an astonishing move for a magnate who has kept a low profile in politics and has said almost nothing about his interest in newspapers, except that he reads them.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bezos will now have a microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing. Keeping with a lot of his tech industry peers, he brings with him a sort of libertarian bent, having supported gay marriage in the state of Washington and fought higher income taxes on wealthy people.
“Of the businesspeople I know, he and Bill Gates are the two most intellectually curious people I know,†said Rob Glaser, the founder of another Seattle technology company, RealNetworks, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s. “It doesn’t surprise me that Jeff would find something with the intellectual depth of The Post an intriguing, compelling thing to be involved with.â€
Mr. Bezos, 49, said in a statement on Monday that he would leave the day-to-day operations at The Washington Post to others. But his history â€" rising quickly as a Wall Street whiz, then starting Amazon.com out of a garage and building it into a retailing giant â€" is chock-full of cold calculations to improve his company’s fortunes. Many of his decisions have panned out, as Amazon has muscled its way into nearly every corner of retailing, leaving many competitors chafed its his wake.
The purchase of The Washington Post fits into one of the more eclectic â€" some might say, eccentric â€" patterns of investing and charitable giving of today’s billionaires. On top of the usual ream of stakes in technology start-ups like Uber and Twitter, Mr. Bezos has indulged his passion for space by financing the recovery from the seabed of an Apollo rocket that carried the first men to the moon.
He is paying for creation of a clock buried in a mountain in West Texas that will tick once a year for the next 10,000 years.
And now, Mr. Bezos â€" a man known for being an unsentimental businessman â€" has invested squarely in a sentimental business steeped in tradition. Of course, The Washington Post deal could feed his demonstrated appetite for reinventing venerable industries, from retailing to book publishing. Amazon’s Kindle business has turned Mr. Bezos from a merchant into a media mogul, as celebrated in some circles as another digital disrupter, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive.
Mr. Bezos and Donald E. Graham, The Washington Post’s chief executive, have longstanding connections that may have helped the discussions. As an article on The Post’s Web site noted on Monday, Mr. Graham gave the Amazon chief advice on how to promote newspapers on the Kindle device. And Amazon is an investor in LivingSocial, an e-commerce venture led by Tim O’Shaughnessy, Mr. Graham’s son-in-law.
He has provided few clues about what changes might be in store. In an interview last year, though, he stated that he did not think people reading the Web would pay for a newspaper subscription because they were too trained to get it free. The Washington Post started an online subscription plan this year.
He said in the same interview that there would be no printed newspapers in 20 years. The Washington Post had more than 457,000 subscribers to its daily edition in the first quarter of this year.
This year, Mr. Bezos was one of a group that put $5 million into the Business Insider, a news site founded by Henry Blodget. Mr. Blodget rose to fame as a Wall Street analyst in the late 1990s with a wild forecast for Amazon’s shares that came true.
Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, who works with the Amazon chief on his personal initiatives, said Mr. Bezos was not available for an interview.
Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and David Streitfeld from San Francisco. Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mogul Gets A Landmark In the Capital .
Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency Jeffrey P. Bezos, left, the founder of Amazon.com, and Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month.
The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a deal that has shocked the industry.
Timeline 
The entrance of The Washington Post building on Monday.
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 written statement.
In the auditorium, he closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad â€" except, he said, “for me.â€
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 â€" 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.â€
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.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amazon’s Founder to Buy The Washington Post.
A first-of-its-kind study by Nielsen has affirmed what nearly everyone in the television industry already suspected: Twitter conversations sometimes do cause people to turn on the TV.
The study, to be released on Tuesday, examined Twitter chatter and minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings of 221 episodes of prime-time shows on major networks. Most of the time, there was no statistically significant relationship between the two sets of data. But Twitter messages were shown to cause a “significant increase†in ratings 29 percent of the time, said Mike Hess, an executive vice president at Nielsen and the senior researcher involved in the study.
A casual connection was also shown in the other direction as well: that is, the ratings had an impact in the volume of related tweets 48 percent of the time. Some genres of shows were much more likely to benefit from Twitter conversation than others.
“Over all, this does validate that additional research around this influence is worth pursuing,†Mr. Hess said.
Nielsen and Twitter are business partners â€" they are promoting a new metric called a Nielsen Twitter TV Rating that measures online conversations about shows â€" so the study may provoke some skepticism. Its findings, though, are likely to be cheered by networks and marketing firms that have invested heavily in social media. Anecdotes about spikes in the ratings credited to Twitter chatter have given producers and advertisers new hopes of assembling mass audiences.
Mitchell J. Lovett, a professor at the University of Rochester who has studied Twitter-television correlations, said that demonstrating causality had proved difficult in the past.
“It is hard to distinguish whether Twitter (or other social media) activity simply reflects existing interest (the person talks about the show because of an interest in watching or plans to watch) rather than causes it,†he wrote via e-mail. For that reason, the Nielsen study “could be groundbreaking,†he said, though he cautioned that he had not examined its methodology yet.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2013, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Study Links TV Viewership And Twitter Conversations.
Ryan Seacrest, who hosts “American Idol†on Fox and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve†every year on ABC, now has a prime-time gig on a third broadcast network. On Monday, NBC announced that Mr. Seacrest would be the host of “The Million Second Quiz,†an interactive game show that is taking over nearly two weeks of the network’s schedule in September.
The announcement came after weeks of talks between NBC and Mr. Seacrest’s representatives, who had to ensure that the game show wouldn’t affect his many other commitments, like his daily radio show for Clear Channel. Mr. Seacrest is based in Los Angeles, but he will be in New York for the duration of the “Quiz,†which will pit trivia players against each other inside an hourglass-shaped structure in Midtown Manhattan.
The first hourlong episode will be shown on Sept. 9, a Monday, and will run nightly through Saturday. Then, after a one-day pause for “Sunday Night Football,†the show will resume on Sept. 16 and run through Sept. 19, when the ultimate winner will be crowned. During the 23 hours between episodes, the competition will continue at the hourglass and through a mobile phone app promoted by NBC.
Paul Telegdy, NBC’s president of alternative and late night programming, said in a statement that having Mr. Seacrest as host would help make the “Quiz†feel like the big-league television event that NBC wants it to be.
“When people see Ryan Seacrest, whether at the Emmys, the Oscars or New Year’s Eve, he is at the epicenter of national events,†Mr. Telegdy said. “He is a broadcaster, in all the traditional sense, but also in the most contemporary â€" he is an accomplished host of live TV and a master of social media and pop culture. This makes him perfect for ‘The Million Second Quiz.' â€
Still, the arrangement is unusual, since networks typically do not like to share talent; the fact that it came together is a testament to Mr. Seacrest’s broad appeal. He will be an executive producer of the “Quiz†as well as its host. On Twitter on Monday he called it an “insane conceptâ€: “The game will take one million seconds to finish…12 days, unknown bathroom breaks.â€
The “Quiz†is initially a one-time scheduling stunt, but as with most things in television, if it proves to be popular, it could come back for another season. It is unclear whether Mr. Seacrest has committed to hosting future iterations, however. His main television job each winter and spring is at Fox, where he hosts “Idol†beginning in January. His “Idol†contract ends when the next season of the singing competition ends in May.
Separately, Mr. Seacrest has a wide-ranging but nonexclusive contract with NBC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, that has him contribute to Olympics coverage, file reports for the “Today†show and produce reality shows for E! and other NBC-owned channels. That contract also ends next spring.