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Showing posts with label Financial markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Financial markets. Show all posts
Washington Post Reaches the End of the Graham
“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.
Then in July, at Allen’s annual Sun Valley conference, Mr. Graham met with one of them, Jeff Bezos, the founder ofAmazon.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.
“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. 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 — built by people trained and nurtured at The Washington Post — 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 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). The Grahams’ resolve to retain ownership was wilted by an industrial sea change that laid many newspapers low. 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 — revenue dropped 44 percent over the past six years — came into sharp focus.
Still, news of the sale and who was buying it was an extraordinary development in the newspaper industry. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the sale is that it happened under the watch of Donald Graham. 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.
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Stock futures showed little loss
"We're in a post-earnings season environment, and it would take a pretty major catalyst to move us significantly higher from here," said Art Hogan, managing director at Lazard Capital Markets in New York.
Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 30 points and Nasdaq 100 futures dipped 2 points.
The S&P's 50-day moving average, currently at 1,692.77, could serve as a support level in any market decline.
A number of analysts downgraded the stock.
Cognizant Tech (CTSH.O) rose 4.9 percent to $77 in premarket trading after reporting a 20 percent rise in second-quarter revenue, while Fossil Group Inc (FOSL.O) rose 9.2 percent to $117.31 after its results.
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM.N) reported a drop in profits as U.S. crop supplies tightened, the sending shares 1.4 percent lower to $37.33 in premarket trading.
Of the 391 companies in the S&P 500 that reported earnings for the second quarter through Monday, 67.8 percent have topped analysts' expectations, in line with the average beat over the past four quarters, data from Thomson Reuters showed. The firm cut its price target on the Dow component by $25 to $175.
Shares of IBM fell 1.4 percent to $192.80.
The U.S. trade deficit narrowed sharply in June to its lowest level in more than 3-1/2 years as imports reversed the prior month's spike, suggesting an upward revision to second-quarter growth.
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German Industrial Orders level up to 3.8%
German industrial orders, a key measure of demand for goods at home and abroad, rose 3.8 percent in June from the level in May, the economy ministry said on Tuesday.
The increase, after two months of falling orders, spells a boost for the country's key manufacturing sector as Europe's biggest economy recovers from a decline late last year amid the eurozone crisis.
The seasonally-adjusted June rise was mainly due to some big-ticket orders, including at the Paris air show, said the ministry. Without major contracts, orders declined 0.7 percent.
Capital goods orders in June rose 6.8 percent while orders for consumer and semi-finished goods fell slightly, by 0.2 percent each.
Overall, domestic orders were up 3.3 percent and export orders rose 4.2 percent.
The revised figure for May was a monthly decline of 0.5 percent, less than the previously reported fall of 1.3 percent.
For the second quarter as a whole, German industrial orders rose 1.2 percent after a smaller first-quarter rise of 0.5 percent.
The ministry noted that "throughout the second quarter, the upward trend in new industrial orders continued both overall and adjusted for major contracts".
More detail news
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