Raju: Great, well thank you very much, it’s really… I appreciate you. all of you coming, Doug and I had to walk just two blocks down to get here and in this very terrible rain, so thank you for coming. What I thought I would was to just kind of talk a little bit about what’s happening at the Washington Post over the last few years, and then later talk about how we cover the world which is kind of his speciality. As most of you know the newspaper industry has been in a little bit of trouble over the last few years, this industry has dealt with worse recessions than the one we’ve dealt with the last two years.

The problem has been that the recession has come at a time when there are really structural kind of shifts in the industry, where a lot of new readers are not kind of coming to newspapers as a result of which it has been a very challenging environment, to not only kind of keep your existing readership but also to kind of figure out a way how you can sustain enough revenue to fund the kind of journalism that our readers are used to from an organization like the Washington Post. It’s not very different compared to some of the other papers but we are in a town that really likes content and the post brand has been a brand that has been seen as a very credible, honest brand for a long time in this town. So it does give us some advantages compared to other papers that are also dealing with similar issues. Just to give you some context in the last 10 years, about 170 newspapers have closed in the US, and it’s out of 1400 newspapers.

So it’s a pretty significant problem and challenge from this industry. The flip side of it is that there’s also never been a better time to be in the news business, by that I mean, there’s never been more readers of news period than there are now. It just so happens that a large number of them consume news online rather than through printed publications and our industry has struggled to kind of figured out a way to kind of really make money online. So we are dependant on the newspaper for our revenue, and the newspaper audience is rapidly kind of slimming while the audience online is really growing and we haven’t yet kind of figured out a way to really effectively make a lot of money. So it has caused…as you can imagine and those of you who are readers of the post, know this, it’s caused a lot of kind of stress, in terms of being able to manage our cost, we’ve significantly reduced our staffing, we used to be around 800, 900 people in the news room about three four years ago, we are about 650 now. 650 is a fairly large news room to be able to cover this community and offer the kind of content that people come to the post for. But it’s been a challenge to kind of manage our resources in doing this, as a result people, over the last three years really kind of focused on a foreign about Washington strategy, which is to say that the reason why people come to Post content, whether it’s print or online is they really want to understand what’s happening in Washington and what it means to where they are.

And thankfully Washington has been involved in a lot more things than it’s ever been involved in, whether it’s running General Motors, for a while or running our banking]system, or dealing with our real estate crisis. So as a result it has been a great time for telling the kind of stories which explain why more people are reading our content, the challenge remains still, how do we kind of effectively run this as a business where we make enough revenue so that Doug can have 15 correspondents who can cover, no, all the way from Latin America to Asia in an effective way, because that’s kind of information we are looking for.