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Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M
- NoB4Mouth 8y agoWashington Post ===>Jeff Bezos of Amazon Time Magazine ===>Marc Bienoff of Salesforce Which one is next New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newyorker? The Silicon Valley super rich are on media outlets buying spree. It seems being online news' aggregators (Facebook, Google & co.)and opinion influencers/manipulators is not enough for them. They have to take hold of the content production too either printed, on TV or Radio... Welcome to SV version of Big Brother!
- RegicidalManiac 8y agoI bet no one will buy NewYorker. Opposite of reading is not not-reading it is reading something like NewYorker.
- goatherders 8y agoNot to be snarky, but you listed two. Add in the Facebook guy that bought New Republic years ago and that's three in the last 6 years. That's a spree?
- donarb 8y agoLaurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic.
- cylinder 8y agoLooks like this is the quickest way for west coast tech new money to instantly purchase prestige with the east coast class.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSomeone should have bought the Village Voice.
- goatherders 8y agoAgreed
- Reedx 8y agoAny bets on how much NYT will go for?
- thaumasiotes 8y agoNYT was bailed out a while ago by investment from Carlos Slim (of the Mexican state-granted telecom monopoly). It looks like he currently holds a little under 15%. https://www.barrons.com/articles/carlos-slim-sells-40-million-more-in-new-york-times-stock-1524244371 https://www.barrons.com/articles/carlos-slim-sells-40-millio...
- xtracto 8y agoCarlos Slim has a good 17% stake of The New York Times so...
- teekno 8y agoOne step closer to Marc's political ambitions
- andrewstuart 8y agoIntriguing that various old school media is being bought by tech billionaires.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoI'm still waiting for the Citizen Kane of our age.
- andrewstuart 8y agoThat's not Rupert Murdoch?
- apengwin 8y agoI thought that was the Social Network
- InclinedPlane 8y agoAlready is Zuckerberg.
- CamperBob2 8y agoThat’d be Jeff Bezos.
- anthanm 8y agoNot really, they are starting to move into the phase of trying to clean up their images and establish better legacies. Controlling the media is just efficient.
- theshadowknows 8y agoI think this makes sense. He will most certainly be running for office soon. I think that’s why he entered into the whole “co-ceo” thing recently. He can focus outwardly but make sure the ship stays right.
- mandeepj 8y agoCould be. Bezos also bought WashingtonPost but he did not run for office.
- padiyar83 8y ago.. yet.
- aviv 8y agoHe just needed to influence the public opinion over the tax situation.
- rdtsc 8y agoInterestingly there was talk of Zuckerberg running. He did his media campaign of traveling the country talking to the "common" people. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-running-for-president-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-run... But Bezos would be more successful I'd think if he wanted to run. Guessing, in general, people have a more agreeable attitude towards Amazon and by extension, Bezos than Facebook and Zuckerberg.
- mandeepj 8y ago> But Bezos would be more successful Maybe due to his age? as he has seen more shades of life than Zuck
- 07d046 8y agoThe Zuckerberg for president talk was before the Cambridge Analytica thing blew up. HN has been critical of FB for a very long time, but it was only then that Zuckerberg's public image really took a beating. Bezos has a much lower public profile. Apparently he's a libertarian. It's easy to portray him as everything that is wrong with American economic life — he's an ultra-rich man running an extremely successful company, while paying countless workers barely enough to live — so it's hard to see him as a viable candidate.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y agoTo read Time Magazine you'll now need to make a Salesforce account, the physical copy will be sunsetted and replaced with a Salesforce Cloud version, and it'll be made entirely in Quip.
- electic 8y agoI think it will be quit the opposite. It will be run like the Washington Post and it will free them up to actually focus on making great content vs. making spammy content to drive clicks and sell magazines.
- gnicholas 8y agoThe Washington Post created a tool called Bandito so they could AB test headlines. Sounds like the opposite of what you described.
- ardy42 8y ago> The Washington Post created a tool called Bandito so they could AB test headlines. Sounds like the opposite of what you described. So that's what happened! I was wondering why the Post's headlines were so clickbait-y.
- pavanlimo 8y agoAB testing is not an evil act by itself. It's an effective technique to understand the user needs. But what you do with the gathered data could make you evil. No business will want to be out of sync with its users. And no business will want to be in charity mode any more than it should. But doing this without hampering the credibility is the key.
- gnicholas 8y agoIt would be great if they would AB test articles. AB testing headlines is basically looking for ways to draw people into articles. So while it’s responsible and even good to test your product, the headline is not the product.
- qubax 8y agoSomething ridiculous about the media environment today. If time magazine can't survive, why not just put it out of business. The same thing with washingtonpost or theatlantic. Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money. I don't see how our society benefits when tech billionaires buy up media like this. If oil titans were buying up failing media just to serve as their personal mouthpiece, we'd be a lot more upset. Also, it's terrible for the media space because it props up failing companies. If failing news companies were allowed to fail, it would open up space for newer companies with better business models or better ideas.
- pavanlimo 8y agoAgreed. Influential people buying influential media outlets can be a concern if used in a biased way. But unfortunately it's not illegal. If one were to go ahead and make it illegal how exactly would one frame the law? There's no easy answer.
- mistrial9 8y agobe careful what you wish for -- this society could be in for a startling set of transitions if the Internet as we know it was cut for some reason(s), or better yet that surveillance on consumption becomes unacceptable. "Failing companies" somehow does not seem to me to describe the situation here..
- ardy42 8y ago> Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money. I always assumed prestige had a lot to do with it, too.
- cwyers 8y agoEverything that's old is new again. Citizen Kane is a movie about just this sort of thing, and it wasn't fanciful (it was in fact suppressed for being too close to Hearst's real life).
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- hogwild 8y agoI hope he steers the ship more to the center. This weeks issue is a puff piece on Nancy Pelosi, complete with flattering cover picture.
- anthanm 8y agothe last thing the US needs is to have anything move further to the right.
- ageek123 8y agoNice thought but Benioff is a liberal, so this seems unlikely.
- cuboidGoat 8y agoWhat is the definition of liberal here? Liberal is often right of center. Also, Nancy Pelosi seems solidly center-politics and Benioff is a capitalist billionaire. If anything they are both boringly conservative in outlook.
- cocacola1 8y agoWhat opinions are emblematic of the center?
- chao- 8y agoI have always felt that "center" was less a matter of the specific opinion positions* , and more a matter of the style of discourse, or the degree of nuance presented about the varying opinions for a particular topic. That may be just my personal feeling on the word, but I have had people agree with it over the years. *Though obviously extremes can be identified, e.g. advocating violence against $GROUP_NAME is not especially "center" in the current US context.
- cocacola1 8y agoInteresting. I'm trying to picture that, but I'm not sure if I can. To me, that sounds more like how people arrive at a position rather than the position itself. Or, how someone comes to the content of their opinion as opposed to where on the spectrum that opinion might be.
- Hnrobert42 8y ago$190M? Wow. Here’s 15 personal yatchs worth more than Time Magazine: https://www.alux.com/worlds-most-expensive-yachts/ https://www.alux.com/worlds-most-expensive-yachts/
- cuboidGoat 8y agoNot sure about worth, they cost more.
- craftyguy 8y agoGenerally if something costs more (and have been sold at said cost), it's because someone thinks it is worth that much.
- Retric 8y agoAt the time of sale sure, but try selling your five year old car for original sticker price.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIf it's something like a Bugatti Veyron, sure, why not? Surely these superyachts fall into that category?
- Retric 8y agoOnly if their is something specific about it that makes them noteworthy. Generally people are buying yachts to be used and they really do age. PS: You can buy a used Bugatti Veyron for below initial sticker price even ignoring inflation. https://www.dupontregistry.com/autos/listing/2006/bugatti/veyron/1884409 https://www.dupontregistry.com/autos/listing/2006/bugatti/ve...
- cuboidGoat 8y agoYachts are a hole in the water into which you pour money. They are fun, but the sea doesn't care about your wish for an asset.
- neonate 8y agohttp://archive.is/teoas http://archive.is/teoas
- vasco 8y agoI know it goes against the HN ethos to just bitch about paywalled articles being shared on the regular, and that upvotes sort it out, and that if they still go to the top is presumably because the core audience already subscribes to these publications. And still, I can't stop myself from wanting to flag all such articles on account of thinking about HN as an open and free site that should allow everyone to consume content equally, without having to resort to these schemes like internet archive, browser extensions and other workarounds.
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- KyeRussell 8y agoNo matter what publications will tell you, introducing advertising will - to an extent - corrupt the journalistic process. Is this something you’re okay with, or does reporting just not have financial worth to you?
- austenallred 8y agoYou know what else corrupts the journalistic process? Going out of business.
- andrewla 8y agoAn interesting feature idea would be to allow there to be multiple links for a given article topic, and allow upvoting and downvoting on the particular links, without having to submit new links that are not obviously related to the same story (and do not share comment threads, etc.). This might lead to a little bit of confusion over particular points made in one of the articles, but it would be balanced against the accessibility of other news sources, and would give us a way to organically work free of blog spam.
- msvan 8y agoTen years ago or so, I'd occasionally read the print version of Time. It was a serious magazine full of in-depth articles. These days, from looking at their online presence, it seems to have mostly devolved into BuzzFeed and news spam for social media. What happened?
- ipqk 8y agoWell, you and everyone else stopped reading the print edition 10 years ago. That's what happened.
- rusk 8y agoSomebody actually got me a years subscription to Time magazine about 10 years ago. I never read it. It was awful.
- vidarh 8y agoThe thing is, lots of magazines have fantastic content. They just don't have it at a volume sufficient to fill a whole magazine every month. I have a stack of Wired for example - early Wired in particular every now and again had fantastic articles. But the ones I've kept are from many months apart, and each one of them I've kept for one article. A magazine like Time with the reputation time has, tends to have that reputation because of the occasional articles and images that are outstanding enough to be remembered, and because their baseline quality is high enough not to detract from the successes, not because everything is consistently good. In print publishers got away with that. People would read it because they often had no competing content available pre ubiquitous internet (most of my remaining paper magazines were bought for transatlantic flights). Online, if the articles don't draw in enough eyeballs, it serves little purpose.
- rusk 8y agoMaybe once upon a time but I feel increasingly that online competition is increasingly being used as a scapegoat for declining editorial standards. The rise and fall of publications is a natural cycle. There’s no reason at all why Time should continue immortally, it’s just a trademark at this stage.
- anonytrary 8y agoThat's it? Time has been so influential; it's so hard to fathom that it could go for $190M.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoIt's hard to imagine that it went for that much. Print magazines are dying. Given possibly debt, pension obligations etc. - it wouldn't be surprising if they were really worth a negative value, i.e. they get bought for cheap just for the tax write offs. Many newspapers facing bankruptcy would love to have a $200M valuation.
- tomahunt 8y agoTime's chief art critic describes what it was like when magazine expense accounts were deep. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the-spectacle-of-skill/amp https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/culture/20...
- growt 8y agoAre newspapers the new billionaire toys? Serious question!
- justtopost 8y agoHardly new, as many commenters point out. But with print media in straits, now is a perfect time to buy some press.
- CosmicShadow 8y agoI don't know much about Time magazine as I feel like I'm too young to have really ever read it. I'm 34, but I recall when I was much younger seeing them at doctor's offices and the like, they seemed too serious or grown up for me to really care about, but they seemed like they were the real deal respectable magazine. I think I once read an article about Putin in one at my dentist in high school which seemed semi interesting but perhaps slightly above my level of care or knowledge of the world at the time. The other thing people know Time for is that everyone wants to have their face on the cover, that's when you know you made it or you are famous. It was even in like every tv show, movie or whatever, a photoshopped version of Time with someone's face on it. I feel like, what is the equivalent of that today? Sure there are millions of outlets, but not too many seem to have that kind of authority, notoriety or brand around them. Even if Time's decisions were total BS and their quality declined because of the industry, that "meme" is still in people's head and it still probably holds value if someone can appear on the cover or said they did. Now Benioff can do this at will if he wants and can even live that dream himself (if he never was on the cover, I don't know)! That alone seems like its worth it considering the fortune someone like Benioff has. Any of his friends who need a boost of influence can walk over to him and ask for a favour, and boom, now they are on the cover of what to the uncaring eye seems like a still prestigious and noteworthy magazine or more likely are endorsed by a brand which may have become a shell of what it once was, but most people haven't really ever put the thought in to realize that because they never read it in the first place.
- unstuckdev 8y agoI've seen Forbes filling that role in a few movies and TV shows. Tau had a scene with a wall full of magazines with the billionaire guy.
- Voyiatzis 8y agoIncorrect. TIME sold for $2.4 billion.