A file photograph showing Jeff Bezos (left) , chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc, talking with Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Co, at the Allen and Company 31st Annual Media and Technology Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 10, 2013. The Washington Post Company has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Bezos for $250mn ending the Graham family’s long-time ownership of the paper. RIGHT: The front of the Washington Post yesterday.
AFP/Washington
The Washington Post, the legendary newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal, is being sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as it seeks to survive the onslaught of the Internet.
Donald Graham, grandson of Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post during the Great Depression in 1933, stunned the US media industry on Monday, announcing the sale of the storied title to Bezos for $250mn.
Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co, had given no hint that the newspaper of record for the nation’s capital was up for sale, despite sinking earnings and plunging subscriptions.
But he admitted that he and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, “have no answers” to the challenge the newspaper faces from the Internet, after seven years of falling revenues, which finally led to the deal.
“I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post,” Graham said in a statement.
“Jeff Bezos’ proven technology and business genius, his long-term approach and his personal decency make him a uniquely good new owner for the Post.”
Annual operating losses more than doubled to $53.7mn last year and were $14.8mn in the second quarter of this year.
Multibillionaire Bezos, who created Amazon, the world’s dominant online retailer, said he was buying the Post in his personal capacity and hoped to shepherd it through the evolution away from traditional newsprint.
“The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs,” he said in a statement to Post employees.
“There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”
The deal involves only the newspaper assets of the Washington Post Co, including its free commuter daily The Express, the Spanish language newspaper El Tiempo Latino, and Robinson Terminal, a warehouse asset.
The Washington Post Co will retain the large educational testing service Kaplan, Foreign Policy magazine, Slate.com, and a cable television operation, as well as the Post’s downtown headquarters in the US capital.
Weymouth, granddaughter of legendary post publisher Katharine Graham, will stay on as the newspaper’s CEO and publisher, Bezos said, along with other top management.
Weymouth said in a statement to readers that she and her family had never expected to sell the newspaper they had owned for eight decades, during which its reporters, editorial writers and world-famous columnists have wielded huge influence over the White House and Congress.
The Post is best known for its Watergate reporting, in which now legendary journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed lawbreaking by the White House of Richard Nixon, leading to the president’s 1974 resignation.
Most recently the Post broke, together with Britain’s Guardian, the story of the US National Security Agency’s extensive domestic and global spying operations.
However, as at other papers, circulation is plummeting, down 8.6% last year and falling at a 7.1% rate for the first half of 2012, to around 448,000 daily.
The decision to sell was made “with a heavy heart,” Weymouth said, but “with an absolute conviction that Mr. Bezos’ ownership represents a unique and extraordinary opportunity for The Washington Post.”
“While he expects The Post to remain profitable, his focus is on the essential role that our journalism has on dialogue and the flow of information in our society,” Weymouth added.
Media analyst Jeff Jarvis said the sale could be considered a philanthropic move by Bezos, but it provided an opportunity for the paper to relaunch itself.
“I hope and pray the real value he brings is his entrepreneurship, his innovation, his experience, and his fresh perspective, enabling him to reimagine news as an enterprise,” Jarvis wrote in a blog post.