The Washington Post, the iconic American newspaper nurtured by the legendary Graham family for 80 years, is all set to change hands. It’s the latest “old media” victim of the mounting financial pressures brought about by the digital era.
The Post’s new owner will be tech billionaire and Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is buying the 136-year-old newspaper and affiliated publications for $250 million. The sale is due to be completed within 60 days.
Best known for uncovering the Watergate scandal and driving President Richard Nixon out of office in 1974, the Post had fallen on hard times lately, with falling print circulation and ad revenue. The overall operating revenue plummeted by as much as 44 per over the last six years.
Even so, staffers did not have a clue to what was in the works until chairman and CEO Donald E. Graham stunned them with the sale announcement on Monday afternoon. Several veteran employees reportedly cried as Graham and his niece, publisher Katharine Weymouth, read out statements and answered questions.
Bezos, whose net worth is put at $25.2 billion, is buying the Post out of his personal wealth. His company, Amazon, the online retail giant, will have no role in the purchase.
The 49-year-old, Seattle-based tech titan, described by Graham as a “uniquely good new owner”, had some words of reassurance for the staff and the reading public. Calling the Post “an important institution”, he said its values won’t change, noting: “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”
Significantly, Bezos is retaining Weymouth, a member of the fourth generation of the Graham family, as publisher and chief executive of the paper. And Martin Baron will continue as executive editor. It has also been reported that Bezos is not contemplating layoffs among the paper’s 2,000 employees. He said he does not have a worked-out plan, adding: “This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation.”
Sketching the paper’s tribulations in recent years, the Post reported that for much of the past decade, the paper could not escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other top media organisations.
“The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies, scattering readers and advertisers across a radically altered news and information landscape and triggering mergers, bankruptcies and consolidation among the owners of print and broadcasting properties,” it said.
From a peak daily circulation of 832,332 in 1993, the figure has been steadily dropping, with its fallout on advertising and overall revenue. As of March this year, the circulation was down to 474,767.
Graham, in an interview to his paper, said every member of his family started out with the same emotion of shock in even thinking about selling the paper. However, when the idea of a transaction with Bezos came up, it “altered my feelings”, he said, adding: “The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive.”
The sale of the Post comes just days after The New York Times Company announced that it has sold The Boston Globe to John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, for $70 million. That was a fraction of the $1.1 billion that the Times had paid acquiring the Globe in 1993.