Late fall reports that The Washington Post Co. (NYSE:WPO) would buy online magazine Slate from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) were confirmed yesterday. The newspaper publisher and software giant reported an agreement to have the e-publication change hands for an unannounced sum. That this actually happened isn't particularly surprising, but the future of the combined entity certainly should be.
The Washington Post, according to a story by Howard Kurtz in the newspaper itself, won't be making substantial cuts at Slate. It will install its own publisher but keep Slate's main editor and most of its staff. In short, the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein will apparently spend "millions of dollars," according to Kurtz's story, on a money-losing operation and leave it pretty much intact.
What that perhaps illustrates best is that Washington Post isn't buying Slate simply so that it can roll more content into its print and online newspaper operations -- in fact, it's difficult at first glance to see how Slate's brand of journalism might coexist with the Post's traditional methods on the same pages. Post staffers, meanwhile, would almost certainly feel protective of their column and Web page inches.
Instead, it seems likely that Slate will continue to operate largely independently as The Washington Post uses it as another window into the online newsmagazine business -- a business it already peeks at via the newspaper's own website and the lyrically named newsweek.msnbc.com. According to a Post VP Kurtz quoted, "Our goal is not to in any way change Slate.... Over time, we hope to find a business model that will make money."
"You're not suddenly going to see a different kind of Slate," she continued. And neither does this seem to heard a particularly different kind of Post -- except that it's one that continues to invest as it looks to find ways to build profits out of the growing online ad sales business, something media organizations have little choice but to do successfully or risk a slow and painful demise.
While financially this deal means relatively little to Washington Post -- and Slate never really meant much to massive Microsoft anyway -- its place in the long-term future of the company may prove significant indeed.
Fool contributor Dave Marino-Nachison doesn't own any of the companies in this story.
