Billionaires buy up old press icons
THE Washington Post. Time magazine. The Atlantic. The Village Voice. The Los Angeles Times. All American media icons, all bought by billionaires in the past half decade. Some are thriving. One died. On the rest, the jury’s still out.
But success is not guaranteed. For the billionaires, meanwhile, ownership provides an alluring combination of a trophy property.
“There is nothing more satisfactory than seeing your name on top of a masthead,” Samir A. Husni, journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, said.
Billionaires have enough money to fail.
That includes tech magnates like Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, or Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who just snapped up Time
magazine for $190 million, and even Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who has acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic.
Mr Benioff said he sees Time magazine as a start-up that’s been “opportunity constrained.” “But we are here to unshackle them,” he said.
“What they see even more than even people in legacy media,” said Professor Husni, is the need to change.