Gotta say, the quantity of writing about the WaPo sale–particularly at WaPo–is pretty astounding. Don’t know if it’s the slow news day or some editorial effort to show the paper’s independence, or some sort of collective mid-life crisis. But nobody’s going to say this story is under-reported.
No kidding. My blogging has been light lately because I’ve been fighting off a cold for the past few days, and on Monday in particular I just gave up. By mid-afternoon, not only was I bleary-eyed from the invasion of rhinoviruses, but everywhere I looked nobody was talking about anything but the sale of the Post. So I called it a day and took a nap.
But seriously: who cares? Rich people have been buying newspapers for a long time, and that’s only accelerated over the past few years. Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal. Sam Zell bought the LA Times. John Henry just bought the Boston Globe. Now Jeff Bezos has purchased the Post. It’s really not that big a deal. The decline of big city dailies has been ongoing for decades; the reasons for the decline are well known; and this has produced an ownership game of musical chairs that shows no signs of slowing down. The Post sale took everyone by surprise, but aside from that it’s just more of the same.
So can we shut up about it already? Pretty please?
