The Washington Post disclosed they sold Newsweek for $1. Actually, they sold it for a lot less than $1. As part of the sale, they agreed to pay $10 million in post acquisition costs and cover employee pension liabilities.
In other words, they paid millions of dollars to get rid of Newsweek.
Ironically, AOL just paid $40 million (or more) to acquire new media company Tech Crunch. Such are the fortunes of new versus old media these days.
We offered to buy Newsweek, but The Washington Post Co. never responded to our bid.
I think at this point they would have some explaining to do to their shareholders. They left at least $49 on the table by not selling to us. And we probably wouldn't have been smart enough to get them to pay for employee pensions.
The major problem Newsweek faced was being a weekly magazine in a 24/7 news cycle. By the time they'd laid out their considered opinions, they'd already been aired, shared, and retweeted in a million other places.
Posted by: Simon Gornick | October 09, 2010 at 09:28 PM