The Washington Post Co.

1150 15th St. NW

Year founded: 1877

Industry: Media

Post 200 Category: Top 125 Companies

Revenue: $3.30 Billion

Net Income/Loss: $332.73 Million

Earnings per share: $34.59

Dividend: $7.00

Stockholder equity: $2.41 Billion

Auditor: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Stock: WPO

Assets: $4.32 Billion

Market capitalization: $8.55 Billion

52-week high: 999.5 12/30/2004

52-week low: 830 7/28/2004

Chairman and CEO: Donald E. Graham

CFO: John B. Morse Jr.

Employees: 14800

Local employees: 6838

Description: The Washington Post Co. is an education and media company. Its namesake flagship is The Washington Post, the nation's fifth-largest newspaper, but the company's biggest revenue-generator is Kaplan Inc., its educational services subsidiary. In addition, The Post Co. owns six television stations, Cable One cable company, the washingtonpost.com Web site, Newsweek magazine, the Gazette newspapers in Maryland, and the Washington Spanish-language newspaper El Tiempo Latino.

Developments: Kaplan, which also runs an online law school, continued to assert its dominance over The Post Co.'s financials in 2004, crossing the $1 billion annual revenue mark for the first time in 2004, bringing in more revenue than the company's newspaper division. In other business, The Post Co. paid undisclosed amounts of cash (no stock) for two modest but potentially important acquisitions in 2004, buying El Tiempo Latino, a weekly aimed at Spanish-speaking readers, and Slate, the online magazine founded by Microsoft Corp. The El Tiempo acquisition is aimed at adding to The Post Co.'s local media domination in Washington, where it has the largest daily newspaper, a string of suburban dailies and a free tabloid. Hispanics are among the fastest-growing minority groups, and El Tiempo, which claims a circulation of 45,000, gives The Post Co. a foothold in the market. With Slate, which features articles and commentary on politics and culture, The Post Co. increases its Internet footprint. For the first time, washingtonpost.com was in the black. As more readers abandon ink-on-paper news—The Post continued to lose circulation in 2004, averaging 726,000 daily sales, down 2.6 percent from 2003—The Post Co. is hoping those readers will move to its Internet sites. In February of this year, The Washington Post gained some new competition from the Washington Examiner, a free daily tabloid published by Clarity Media Inc., a Denver holding company owned by billionaire investor Philip F. Anschutz. The Post Co. added Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft founder and world's richest man Bill Gates, to its board in September, three months before the company bought Slate. The company said there was no connection between the two events. The board also boasts the world's second-richest man, investor Warren E. Buffett, along with Internet mogul Barry Diller. The company's television station group had the benefit of a presidential election and an Olympics to boost ad sales, with revenue up 15 percent over 2003 to $362 million. At Cable One, which has more than 700,000 customers, mainly in the middle of the country, 2004 revenue was up 9 percent over 2003 to nearly $500 million.