Credit Suisse/First Boston and UBS Warburg Media Conferences

December 6, 2000



The presentations at this meeting contain certain forward-looking statements that are based largely on the Company’s current expectations. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and achievements to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. For more information about these forward-looking statements and related risks, please refer to the section titled "Forward-looking Statements" in Part 1 of the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K and the section titled "Risk Factors" under "Shareholder Information" on the Company’s website, www.washpostco.com.

Questions and Answers
By Mr. Graham and Mr. Grayer

QUESTION: Don or Jonathan, can you tell us where you are in the investment cycle right now with Kaplan as far as cash flow? Looking at it over the next couple of years, will it continue to be a source of investment and generate negative EBITDA, and also looking at longer-term strategically over the next several years, will Kaplan stay as one division or can pieces of Kaplan eventually be spun out, and should it and will it stay as a division of The Washington Post Company overall?

MR. GRAHAM: We've said that this year between WPNI and several Kaplan ventures, we are investing, we said at the start of the year, 130 million, and I believe we may achieve that in investments in what we think are promising, fast-growing businesses. And we never forecast future operating results.

I know this makes us the out-buyer among companies presenting to you, but we don't for what we think are very good reasons, and I think it would be a safe assumption that we are not going to go from 130 million to zero. But in the case of Kaplan, we are not talking about Internet high fliers here. We are talking about businesses that sell you something using the Internet as a delivery vehicle, and I will just rest my case on Jonathan's presentation.

You are asking if some parts of Kaplan may be separately offered for IPO. BrassRing has said that if market conditions are right, we would consider an IPO of BrassRing, but will Kaplan remain a division of The Washington Post Company, and is that the best use? Absolutely.

MR. GRAHAM: Yes, but we are running a large profitable core business. We have chosen to invest all the money we are making and more in two or three start-up businesses that we think are equally promising.

Shareholders have to understand that. I think most of our shareholders do. We are not talking about a business that on the whole is in an investment phase.

QUESTION: You mentioned that you are slowing down the opening of SCORE! and start to work on pricing, if you could go into that into a little bit more depth, and then, secondly, you mentioned the CPA exam. I am wondering what the timing is of the award of that and who you think will be [inaudible].

MR. GRAYER: Well, the reason we are slowing down the opening of SCORE! centers is we really think there is a pricing opportunity by enhancing some of the services that we provide into the home through the Internet, along with the purchase at the SCORE! center, which will drive unit profitability, and we are shooting for $150,000 per unit. That is a goal we are setting for ourselves. Whether we can get there or not, time will tell.

We needed to take all of our energies the next year and devote it to that integration, and so opening up that many centers is a deterrent to making that happen.

What will help SCORE! is the hiring market is getting easier. We were competing against option packages that were difficult. We had [inaudible] hiring our coaches our of our centers to work at their start-ups and venture funds. We are a big employer in the Bay Area. That is going to get better, and we could open up a few more because of that.

As far as the CPA exam, we are not going to compete putting--the giving of the exam, but the CPA preparation market, which is a nice market, is really dominated by [inaudible]. They have bought the players in it, and it should open up a nice market opportunity to [inaudible] because they don't have the computerized test labs to offer simulated experiences for CPA test-takers, and that should give us an opportunity to drive a new business.

MR. GRAHAM: Do you want to talk about the technology Kaplan Centers possesses and how that compares with your competitors?

MR. GRAYER: Well, because we didn't franchise, because we took back the operating relationships with the centers in '93, we were able to invest a lot of money in the infrastructure at the center level. So we have complete Internet connectivity, and we have computers that simulate the real exam.

Princeton Review, which is our largest competitor, does not have that, and that is why we have done so well over the last years. Our graduate market share has really dramatically grown because you cannot take a simulated experience with anyone else but us, and that is important.

QUESTION: Jonathan?

MR. GRAYER: Yes.

QUESTION: You mentioned the mature centers at SCORE! have about 300 students?

MR. GRAYER: Yes.

QUESTION: Is that the capacity, the optimal capacity of the centers?

And secondly, what has been the experience in terms of turnover among the students in the SCORE! centers?

MR. GRAYER: Well, to the first question, I would say, do you have kids?

QUESTION: [Inaudible.]

MR. GRAYER: 300 kids is a lot of kids.
We think that we lose that intimacy when we get beyond 300. We have a few centers that we have allowed to grow larger. We generally try to open up a contiguous center when we get that big, just because it comes hard to manage when they get north of that.

We are working on that. The experiment I just referred to, we might be able to increase our capacity.

Your second question was?

QUESTION: The turnover among your students in the centers?

MR. GRAYER: The turnover among the students. We average--and I will push it up a little, a little north of 10 months that a student is staying with us. Obviously, the single--greatest driver of profitability is if we can move that from 10 to 11 or a year. It is very similar to the subscription business in a magazine.

MR. GRAHAM: I would like to take one more question.

QUESTION: Could you talk a little about your economic outlook for 2001 with stations and the paper, particularly advertising, retail, classified, and such?

MR. GRAHAM: We really don't do forecasting of any kind, and if I had been forecasting 2000 with you a year ago with you, I would have been wrong. If I sit here and try to forecast 2001, I will probably be wrong, too.

If the economy does slow down--and we don't know that it is--Washington has been more recession-resistant in the past than other markets. Jonathan pointed out that a lot of Kaplan's elements actually will do better if the economy ever slows down, and we think the cable business is pretty strong, whatever economic tides come.

But the secret to the station operation has been keeping expense levels very, very low, while running quality news operations that tend to make us the number-one station in town, and that economic formula works very well in good times and bad.

QUESTION: The questions are twofold. Both relate to cable versus satellite. First, your local share versus satellite providers in your territory?

MR. GRAHAM: Oh, there's no question that the DBS subs, the 15 percent we spoke of, are all basically in the last four or five years that their growth has been very strong. Local to local penetration, local to local in these very small markets is not high on the horizon of DBS providers, and again, we've got a couple of product offerings now that are going to be very, very tough for DBS to match.

MR. GRAHAM: The question is: what would be the stand-alone no-growth margins at Kaplan today? The stand-alone no-growth margins at Kaplan today are negative because the highly--but it is important for me to say to you that the business we bought in 1984 was profitable, and the core business that Jonathan described in such detail, Kaplan Core and Kaplan Professional, are highly profitable today. We are choosing to take that money and more, and reinvest it in SCORE!, eScore and Kaplan College, which are start-ups.

Then this summer we bought Quest, which is another business whose numbers you can get in a minute because it was a public company till August, which is a highly profitable company.

So we have a profitable core business. We're reinvesting more than all the money in these start-ups. We said at the start of this year we're investing $130 million in Kaplan and washingtonpost.com Internet businesses. And Quest was a profitable addition on top of that.

MR. GRAHAM: Are our online classified revenues replacement for our print revenues?

So far we have grown the recruitment stream, for instance, at $10 million, while print recruitment revenues have grown. So, you know, it doesn't look like it's going to be necessarily that way. I honestly think--think of yourselves as an employer for the moment. You're getting tons and tons of response to the print ads, and you do nothing but increase your response when you add the online component as well. And to get different response, you can place more ads. One thing I think we're proving, you know, the $10 million business, it isn't that important in the scheme of things, but $10 million in a local recruitment site is a huge number, and I think it is effectively demonstrating--if you go on the Web and look at this site against its national competitors, that recruitment is, to a surprising--well, to a great extent, still a local business. The job seeker--the vast majority of job seekers are looking where they live, not across the country or the world. There's a few that are looking across the country and the world, but it's a few.

And right now with every company in the United States desperate for high-quality people, these are two great ways of getting them.

MR. GRAHAM: Are we selling print and online classified as a package? Yes. We're also selling them separately. If you want to buy online ads, you certainly can. If you want to buy print ads without online, you certainly can. And no portion of that $10 million is an allocation. That's all--we're not allocating print revenue to online. Every dollar of that is spent by customers who want the online site.

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