Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) is a diversified American conglomerate, best known for formerly owning the newspaper for which it was once named, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.
Its holdings include the online magazine Slate, Graham Media Group (formerly Post-Newsweek Stations), a group of five large-market television stations, higher education company Kaplan, and the now closed Trove (formerly WaPo Labs)--the developers of a news reader app. Graham Holdings Company also owned cable television and internet service provider Cable One until it was spun off in 2015.
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Corporate history
The history of Graham Holdings Company dates back to 1877, when the Post was first published. The Washington Post Company was incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1889, and remained a District of Columbia corporation until it changed its place of incorporation to Delaware in 2003. It is a public company and its Class B common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GHC; it went public in 1971.
Descendents of the late Eugene Meyer (including Chairman and CEO Donald E. Graham, his sister Lally Weymouth, and the beneficiaries of various family trusts) collectively control the company through their ownership of the unlisted Class A common stock that selects 70% of the company's board of directors. As of 2014, it forms more than 90% of the family's assets. Prior to 2014, Berkshire Hathaway was a substantial holder of the public Class B common stock that selects 30% of the company's board of directors, but exchanged most of that stock for WPLG-TV, one of Graham Holdings' television stations, and other assets, in 2014.
2013 sale of The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013 it was announced that the Washington Post Company would sell the flagship newspaper for $250 million to Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com. The Washington Post Company agreed to adopt a new corporate name once the sale was finalized. It adopted Graham Holdings Company as the new name effective November 29, 2013. Amazon.com was not involved in the sale. Nash Holdings LLC, a company owned by Bezos, closed the purchase of the newspaper and affiliated publications on October 1, 2013. Graham Holdings Company retained ownership of WaPo Labs, its technology innovation group, since rebranded as Trove.
Since 1950, the company had been based in the Washington Post building in Washington, D.C., which was sold off separately in 2014. Its new headquarters are at 1300 North 17th Street in Arlington, Virginia, with the choice of state motivated (according to Don Graham) by the proximity to Congress and the fact that two of the holding's activity areas, education and health care, are subject to federal regulation.
In 2014, Tim O'Shaughnessy joined GHC as president, the founder of LivingSocial and a son-in-law of CEO Don Graham. Tim O'Shaughnessy became CEO in November 2015.
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Education
The Education area yielded 61% of GHC's revenue in 2014. Kaplan, Inc. is one of the world's largest providers of educational services. Kaplan focuses on three areas: higher education, professional training, and test preparation. Headquartered in New York City, Kaplan had $2.2 billion in revenue in 2013.
StudentAdvisor.com is the latest education resource launched by Graham Holdings Company. StudentAdvisor.com is an education research (reviews written by students, alumni, and parents) and comparison destination (tools to download and compare multiple colleges) for students, parents, and lifetime learners.
In January 2016, Graham Holdings launched CyberVista, a cybersecurity training and education company.
Broadcasting
Through its Graham Media Group subsidiary (formerly Post-Newsweek Stations), Graham Holdings owns a group of five television stations. Led by chief executive officer Emily L. Barr, the company is now based in Chicago, after being co-located for several years with its local NBC affiliate WDIV-TV in Detroit.
Stations
Stations are arranged in alphabetical order by state and city of license.
Cable
Cable ONE is an Internet and cable television provider based in the Phoenix, Arizona, area serving over 730,000 customers in 19 states.
In November 2014, Graham Holdings said it would spin off Cable ONE as a separate, publicly traded company in 2015. The spin-off was completed on July 1st, 2015.
Interactive
Graham Holdings Company also owns three firms active in various capacities on the World Wide Web. These include The Slate Group, which publishes Slate, Slate V, and ForeignPolicy.com. The Root, an online magazine focusing on African American culture, used to be held by The Slate Group until Graham Holdings sold it to Univision Communications in 2015. Graham Holdings Company also owns SocialCode, an advertising agency specializing in social media/ID-based marketing, and Panoply, a podcasting network.
Health care
In October 2012, the firm purchased Celtic Healthcare Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Celtic Healthcare, based in Pennsylvania, provides home health care in western, central, and northeastern Pennsylvania as well as Montgomery and Baltimore County, Maryland. It also provides home hospice services in the same areas, as well as owns a 10-bed inpatient hospice in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. In 2014, it had around 558 full-time and 45 part-time employees.
In 2014, Graham Holdings bought a majority stake in Troy, Michigan-based Residential Healthcare Group, the parent company of Residential Home Health and Residential Hospice, which provides at-home and on-site health care and hospice services in Michigan and Illinois.
Energy production
In July 2013, Graham Holdings purchased Forney Corp. for an undisclosed sum. The company, which is based in Addison, Texas, manufactures equipment that monitors and controls the combustion of coal, natural gas, and other materials. This equipment is sold to electric utilities for use in power generation plants.
Manufacturing
In June 2014, Graham Holdings acquired Joyce/Dayton Corp., a Dayton, Ohio-based manufacturer of screw jacks and other linear motion systems.
In November 2015, Graham Holdings acquired Group Dekko, a Garrett, Indiana-based electrical manufacturer.
In April 2017, Graham Holdings acquired Hoover Treated Wood Products, a Thompson, Georgia-based manufacturer of fire retardant wood and other wood products.
See also
- Lists of corporate assets
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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