Home » Bezos Jeffrey P » Commodity markets » Financial markets » Graham Donald E » Graham Katharine » Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures » Newspapers » Stock Market » Trading » Washington Post » Weymouth Katharine Bouchage » Washington Post Reaches the End of the Graham

Washington Post Reaches the End of the Graham

“We knew we could survive, but we always felt that our ownership should do more than help the paper survive,” Mr. Graham said in an interview Monday evening. Then in July, at Allen’s annual Sun Valley conference, Mr. Graham met with one of them, Jeff Bezos, the founder ofAmazon.com. Mr. Graham liked what he heard. So after 80 years of control and editorial leadership by the Graham family, The Post began to change ownership Monday, when Mr. Bezos agreed to buy it for $250 million. “It is a very big Washington moment,” said David Gergen, who was involved in four presidential administrations. “When Kay Graham had you to her house, it was a command performance,” Mr. Gergen added, referring to Mr. Graham’s mother, the paper’s leader for more than two decades. To many, the Washington that the newspaper once guided from family dinners and select Georgetown salons disappeared long before the sale. The rise of the Web site Politico — built by people trained and nurtured at The Washington Post — and other insurgents foretold a change in the order of things. The days when people snapped open the daily paper to find out the things they should care about were long past, replaced by a cacophony of information sources, many of them far more driven by ideology than The Washington Post. In selling to Mr. Bezos, the Grahams left the Sulzbergers, the owners of The New York Times, as the last family standing in a club that once also included the Chandlers (Los Angeles Times), the Copleys (San Diego Tribune), the Cowles (Minneapolis Star Tribune), and the Bancrofts (Wall Street Journal). The Grahams’ resolve to retain ownership was wilted by an industrial sea change that laid many newspapers low. For a time, the newspaper was propped up by its education division, Kaplan Inc., but when that company encountered regulatory and business turbulence, the losses at the newspaper — revenue dropped 44 percent over the past six years — came into sharp focus. Still, news of the sale and who was buying it was an extraordinary development in the newspaper industry. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the sale is that it happened under the watch of Donald Graham. In the popular imagination, journalism reached its highest and best calling during Watergate, when The Post and its determined owner, Ms. Graham, took on a sitting president. The idea that Mr. Graham would sell the paper, whatever merits the sale might entail, seemed as unlikely as Henry V giving up the crown.

di 1:00 AM
 
Copyright Login MI All Rights Reserved