Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I think the board thing specifically is probably an emotional thing. But the paper, yeah, at this point it's not only the dominant paper in Washington, but it's one of the foremost publications in the country if not the World after the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. It both has that franchise effect in Washington? I mean, it is the paper for that city, which I think comes from a little bit of a different story with the Buffalo Evening News, which I don't think we'll get to today. But Buffett famously referred to being the only paper in town or the biggest paper in town as an unregulated tollbooth that you have. Where you basically have pricing power and everybody's going to subscribe to the newspaper, so it's a license to print money. There's definitely his notion of a franchise town newspaper is awesome. This is one of the ones in the most important town in America, and now it has this national/international reach. Not to mention, all of these great characteristics of a media business where you create the content once and then it's infinitely replicable, and of course, there are delivery costs, but it’s a freaking good business. It's wonderfully defensible. I think specifically on that defensibility of the newspaper part of the business at the time and the winner-take-all network effect in any given geography, is that if you're able to amass enough readers—it's just like the stamps business—then the advertisers want to be where the majority of the readers are. And once you get the ad dollars flowing in from the advertisers, then you can offer deals. It's like the group buying clones in China. You can offer subscription deals to enough subscribers to grow your subscriber base, that you can crowd out all the competition, and the market just naturally tips to a single player. That's happening in Washington, a large city, a fantastic newspaper franchise.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.