“The pattern of a newspaperman’s life is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty,’ ” A. J. Liebling wrote. “Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.” And sometimes, out of the blue, the ownership changes and you don’t know what the hell you’re getting in your bucket—fresh oats or cut glass.
At around 4:25 Monday afternoon, the staff of the Washington Post was summoned to the paper’s auditorium, a vast room where the presses used to be. The meeting would begin at 4:30, they were told. Donald E. Graham, the leader of the Graham family, which has owned the paper since Eugene Meyer bought it at a bankruptcy auction in 1933, stood solemnly before journalists who had been demoralized over the years by staff cuts, precipitous plunges in circulation, and endless dark rumors. It was a room full of reporters and editors, and yet, as one told me, “We thought we were there to hear that the Grahams had sold the building.”
In fact, Graham told them, in a voice so full of emotion that he had to stop a few times to gather himself, they were selling the Post and a handful of smaller papers—for two hundred and fifty million dollars, to Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, who is estimated to be worth more than twenty-five billion dollars. Graham asked the people there not to tweet, just to listen. The assembled were so stunned that when it came time for questions no one had any for a while; Graham had to urge them out of their silence.
“This was just plain sad. Now we belong to a guy who is so rich that the paper is around one per cent of his net worth,” a reporter told me soon after the meeting. “This was the family acknowledging that we can’t do it anymore, and we have to give it to someone else. And we love the Graham family, we are proud of the family.”
Katharine Weymouth, the publisher and Donald’s niece, was the next speaker. She concentrated on the nuts and bolts—assurances about pensions and health plans—but she also said that she thought that her grandmother, the late Katharine Graham, who guided the paper, along with Benjamin Bradlee, through the pivotal crises of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, would have approved of the sale. But when I asked Donald Graham about that later, he said, “Well, she doesn’t know that. And I don’t know that. Kay Graham loved this place. She did say, though, that to be a great newspaper you have to be profitable. We weren’t looking to close the Post or to a forced sale, but we finally saw that this is what was best for the paper.”
After talking with the board of directors, Donald Graham quietly began looking for a potential buyer around Christmas of 2012. “We were in our seventh consecutive year of declining revenues, and there was the question of, What could we do?” Graham told me. The company had bought Slate and Foreign Policy (and is holding on to them) and sold Newsweek (which changed hands again this weekend). “Our strategy had been to innovate like hell in digital and other businesses and offset the declines in print revenues. But Katharine said the declines were going to go on, for the eighth and ninth straight years. And so …”
The trends were violent and undeniable. Graham and Weymouth saw circulation drop from 832,332 average subscribers, in 1993, to 474,767. The newsroom staff was once more than a thousand; it is now around six hundred and forty. The paper is still capable of extraordinary journalism—in June, it broke the Edward Snowden-National Security Agency surveillance story, along with the Guardian, and, only last Sunday, scored the first interview with the leader of the Egyptian military coup, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, in which the general said, nervily, “you have turned your back on the Egyptians and they won’t forget it.” But the Post is clearly a diminished version of its old self. It is still serious and grounded, but not quite essential in the way its rival, the Times, remains.
Graham, who apprenticed at his family’s paper as a sports editor and as a cop in order to learn the city, was meant to inherit his mother’s mantle—if not as a figurehead of the old Georgetown establishment then as the custodian of the most authoritative paper in D.C. Instead, especially with the rise of the Internet and the newspaper crisis that came with it, he became a kind of tragic character: decent, generous, fair-minded, ethical, but unable to reorient the Post. I worked at the paper for a decade, and while you might have disagreed fiercely with his editorial page or his political lobbying on behalf of his educational company, or second-guessed his decision to pass on certain investments, like Politico, or not to take a bigger chunk of Facebook from his willing friend Mark Zuckerberg, you couldn’t doubt his heart. And though what’s left of the Post company, with its television affiliates and cable systems, its real-estate holdings and education company, will still be worth a fortune, I can’t help thinking this: Donald Graham’s heart is broken.
What he could not stand to do was break the Post. On Monday afternoon, he sacrificed his family’s ownership in the hopes of saving the thing itself. From another owner, you wouldn’t believe it; you would think he was bailing—as simple as that. But on the moral continuum of newspaper owners, Donald Graham is at the opposite end from the likes of Sam Zell.
Leonard Downie, who was executive editor from 1991 to 2008, told me, “Don hated all the cutting, and he just didn’t want to cut anymore. His hope is that Bezos will invest. It’s a family company, so he doesn’t have the obligations of a public company. And the hope is that, like with the Kindle and Amazon, he’ll invest deeply, and his vision will prove out.… I told several senior editors here that it will be an exciting time, but how it will come out I am not sure. Warren Buffett”—a friend and business mentor to the Graham family for decades—“also concluded that Bezos is someone with long-term vision.”
Graham started talking to Bezos several months ago, then they stopped talking for a while, and then they met again at a conference in July. By all accounts, the price they settled on was, in the modern age, generous. A decade ago, the Post might have sold for several times that or more.
There are two mysteries remaining in this story: the inner workings of the Graham family and the intentions of Jeff Bezos. What conversations and disagreements transpired between and among Donald, his three siblings, and Katharine Weymouth, are, for the moment, a fog. Donald Graham insisted to me that he got “zero pressure” from his family to sell: “We love the place. So does every Graham.”
Bezos made a statement saying all the correct and anodyne things, but he was not terribly revealing. He rarely is. How much is he interested in using the political influence of the Post as an instrument of his main business? Why would he buy such a traditional media outlet rather than start another Internet enterprise of his own? The Graham family tried hard to assure everyone that this was for the best, that Donald Graham has known Bezos for fifteen years and trusts him to do the right thing: invest for the long term in real journalism. (“Jeff is a man of enormous personal decency,” Graham said.)
“This is the single biggest thing Jeff Bezos has bought with his own money, and I don’t think for a moment that he regards it as a rich man’s toy,” Katharine Weymouth told me. “He must have thought a lot about it and what he wants to do with it. Donald said to him, ‘Look, The Post is going to cover you and Amazon, and probably in ways that you don’t like. It’s not worth buying the paper if you think that’s going to change.’ Don took this process extremely seriously. He would not have sold the paper to anyone who didn’t share our values.”
Bezos’s politics are something of a puzzle. He has contributed to local candidates in the state of Washington, including Democrats Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Republican Slade Gorton, and, quite prominently, to the cause of gay marriage. He has also given money to two liberal Democrats outside of Washington: John Conyers, of Michigan, and Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. Amazon, a Post source said, has demonstrated itself to be “a First Amendment absolutist” when it comes to the sale of controversial books (including “Mein Kampf”) and an unwillingness to censor reader comments. One political magazine that celebrated the sale was Reason, a libertarian publication. Its story called Bezos “the libertarian founder and C.E.O.” of Amazon and said that Bezos had contributed to the Reason Foundation. If Bezos is a libertarian, however, he is not one in the deeply conservative mold of the Koch brothers, who have shown signs of wanting to buy mainstream publications, including the Los Angeles Times.
If Bill Gates, for one, had bought the Post, this might be a somewhat easier picture to discern. In his maturity, after making billions, Gates, together with his family, began to figure out what more he wanted to do, politically, morally, and otherwise. He wanted to put his fortune into the eradication of diseases, into educational opportunity, and other causes. Bezos, who is in his late forties, has not reached that stage of his life—he is still immersed in the formation and development of his business. His main outside interest has been to invest in Blue Origin, a human-spaceflight startup company, which sounds more Richard Branson than Donald Graham. He’s invested tens of millions in a ten-thousand-year clock. The experience with Amazon gives Bezos an extraordinary grasp of everything from technology to the consumer behavior of millions of people. But why he would pay a quarter of a billion dollars in cash for a newspaper remains an open question.
Bezos announced that he had asked that the top of the paper’s editorial and management team—Weymouth as publisher, Martin Baron as executive editor, and Fred Hiatt as editorial-page editor—stay on, though staffers reasonably wondered how long that might last. New owners do not customarily stick with old managers. Baron, a former editor of the Boston Globe, replaced Marcus Brauchli in November, and he has helped lift the morale of the paper by breaking major news, like the N.S.A. story, and by rededicating the paper to competing for preëminence in the capital, where it had lost ground to the Times, Politico, and other publications. Weymouth has had a mixed record as publisher—something that her uncle has always been reluctant to admit, at least in public. When I asked her if she felt any sense of failure, she said, “I don’t feel like it’s the end and that I have to summarize my legacy in terms of this news. I hope I’ll be here for the long term, and I will stay as long as Jeff will have me.… History will have to judge. There are no easy answers in this business, and if there were everyone would have figured them out by now.”
Above: Donald Graham, center, congratulates Philip Kennicott, after Kennicott is announced as the winner for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in April. Photograph by Matt McClain/ The Washington Post/Getty. Middle: Katharine Graham and Benjamin Bradlee look over reports of the Supreme Court decision that permitted the paper to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers. Photograph by Charles del Vecchio/The Washington Post/Getty.
Read Ian Crouch on John Henry’s purchase of the Boston Globe.
