Description
Graham Holdings is a diversified American conglomerate holding company. Headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia, and incorporated in Delaware, it was formerly the owner of The Washington Post newspaper and Newsweek magazine.
Its current holdings include the digital marketing company SocialCode, the online magazine Slate, Graham Media Group (formerly Post-Newsweek Stations), a group of seven television stations, higher education company Kaplan, and the now-defunct 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.
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.
Descendants of the late Eugene Meyer (including Chairman 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.
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.
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.
In 2014, Tim O'Shaughnessy, founder of LivingSocial and a son-in-law of CEO Don Graham, joined GHC as president. O'Shaughnessy became CEO in November 2015.
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 1, 2015.
In March 2018, following several years of enrollment decline, Graham sold Kaplan University to the Purdue University system, and it was rebranded Purdue University Global.
