Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos agreed to shell out $250 million to buy The Washington Post yesterday in an abrupt and shocking acquisition coming just two days after Red Sox owner John Henry purchased The Boston Globe for a bargain $70 million — but industry observers say those prices reflect the properties' different values.
"The Boston Globe is The Boston Globe, The Washington Post is a different kind of story," said Harold Vogel, a media analyst with Vogel Capital Management. "It's much more of a national — international — paper, and it's in the center of the sausage-making, the politics-making capital, so it has a different value than Boston."
Bezos' cash deal includes The Washington Post newspaper, washingtonpost.com and the company's other regional papers, but doesn't include Slate or the Post's company headquarters. The Globe deal, on the other hand, has been seen largely as a real estate transaction with newspapers thrown in, because it includes the company's valuable Morrissey Boulevard property in a prime location just off the Southeast Expressway, in addition to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
"Clearly, there are some differences that would seem to make Henry's deal a sweet deal because he's getting real estate that's pretty close to what the purchase price was, so if he tries and doesn't succeed, he has that to fall back on," said Rick Edmonds of Poynter Institute. "I'm not aware of something like that in the Post instance. ... The Post is a bigger deal and it has national and international readership in the way the Globe doesn't."
The Post this year registered 431,149 average daily print circulation, while the Globe showed 172,048, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.
Newspaper analyst John Morton said there were several aspects at play that drove up the cost of the Post to 31⁄2 times the cost of the Globe.
"A stronger market position, no competition, a bigger reputation and probably a buyer who was willing to pay a premium in order to buy it," Morton said.
The Globe's sale had been a poorly kept secret since February when it was first announced, with leaks throughout the process when bidders' names and offer ranges emerged. The fact the Post had even been on the market stunned the industry when the sale news broke yesterday.
"If you had asked me yesterday if the Graham family would ever dispose of The Washington Post, I'd say never," Morton said. The Post was family-owned, built up following a bankruptcy auction purchase in 1933, while the Globe was bought by the New York Times in 1993 for $1.1 billion — its subsequent pennies-on-the-dollar sale showing the losses newspapers have suffered in the Internet era.
Henry yesterday toured the Globe newsroom for the first time since Saturday's announcement, meeting with reporters and editors, but has said he won't go into more specifics about his plans for the New England Media Group until the deal officially closes.
Henry has indicated he wants to bring in other leaders to help him with the "community commitment and effort" of running the Globe but hasn't mentioned any potential partners. Meanwhile, a Federal Communications Commission official said the agency's cross-ownership rules apply to traditional broadcast stations that use the public airwaves, and so don't apply to Henry's New England Sports Network, as a regional cable channel.
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