Sidney Harmon, the 91-year old husband of California Democrat Rep Jane Harmon’s $1 bid for Newsweek has been accepted.
How do you make a small fortune in the magazine business? You start with a large fortune.
That’s what Sidney Harmon, the 91-year old husband of California Democrat Rep Jane Harmon, plans to do now that his $1 bid for Newsweek has been accepted.
The New York Times has the story:
President Obama is worried that Newsweek's new owner might change the magazine's longstanding policy of featuring him on the cover every week
According to several people who have been briefed on the process, Mr. Harman’s bid appealed to Mr. Graham and the Post Company because Mr. Harman has said he would retain a significant number of the magazine’s 325 employees. The financial details of the sale were not known, though one person with knowledge of Mr. Harman’s bid said last week that he would pay $1 in exchange for absorbing Newsweek’s considerable financial liabilities.
Newsweek has struggled through the recession more than most weekly news magazines, losing nearly $30 million last year alone. It was earning that much a year as recently as 2007.
And the longer it remained on the market, the less tenable its financial situation became. It has been an expensive product for the Post Company to produce, with its various international editions and separate back-office positions that were specific to the magazine. Instead of sharing a general counsel and accounting staff with the Post Company, for example, Newsweek has its own employees in those positions.
And if you’ll buy Newsweek, we have a bridge we’d like to sell you.
For god’s sake, man, we just ran IHateTheMedia.com through stimator.com and learned that this site is worth 3,684 times more than Newsweek. And our only liabilities are the lack of a proofreader and receding hairlines.
