How Journalism Remains Strong During America’s 250th

The single news event that has defined an era of investigative reporting over the last 50 years was the Watergate scandal from 1972-1974, which led President Nixon to resign from office. Notably, Vice President Vance recently declared, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.”

Despite living in a faster news cycle, the national news business today, as a financial matter, is qualitatively stronger and more sustainable than ever.

All the President’s Men, the book written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward while they were young reporters at the Washington Post, is still the gold standard for how a first-rate news organization operates with extraordinary results.

According to GuruFocus, Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, estimated the intrinsic value of the Washington Post Company at $400 to $500 million in 1973.

At that time, the market value of the stock was only about $80 million. Buffett thought it was a good buy. He had become a close friend of Katharine Graham, the Post family’s owner and publisher. He bought a large stake for $10.6 million. The investment, according to Yahoo Finance, became one of his most successful holdings.

After four decades, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway exited the position in 2014 through a tax-free $1.1 billion stock swap.

Jeff Bezos, the fourth-richest man in the world according to Forbes Real Time Billionaires List, bought the company in 2013 for a modest $250 million. He told President Trump at Mar-a-Lago that purchasing the Washington Post was “the worst investment I ever made,” according to the new book, Regime Change, by two New York Times reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Their book has been number one on the New York Times best-seller list for the last two weeks, selling more than 300,000 copies (many of those copies sold on Bezos’ Amazon).

Bezos, according to the book, complained to Trump that the Post’s business-side staff were “terrible” and did not listen to his direction like the executives at his other companies.

The New York Times is owned by the New York Times Company. It too is a family business. A.G. Sulzberger is publisher and chairman. The company is worth just under $12 billion in market capitalization. The Times currently boasts over 12.5 million digital subscribers. The Washington Post has 2 million digital subscribers.

Lastly, the Wall Street Journal is owned by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his family. They control News Corp, a privately held company with an overall market capitalization of $14.8 billion, according to Stock Analysis. The Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by paid circulation with over 4.7 million total subscribers, the majority of which are digital, according to the News Corporation’s Q3 report.

These big three national news organizations remain committed to holding power to account despite serious periods of tension between the business leadership and the editorial leadership sides. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have surged ahead of the Washington Post in all of the metrics in recent years. It may be worth remembering the fearless Katharine Graham, who used to say, “News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.”

So to conclude in this marvelous, magical month of our 250th, I would advise keeping in mind a few memorable words from Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote in a letter he subsequently sent from Paris in 1787 to Edward Carrington, a prominent Virginia statesman and trusted confidant of George Washington… “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”