News has just hit the airwaves that Amazon’s billionaire Jeff Bezos is buying “The Washington Post” for $250 million in cash.
With this sale, which is expected to be completed in the next 60 days, Jeff will become the sole owner of the newspaper and it will end the Graham’s family’s 80-year control of the title.
It is interesting to note that Jeff Bezos is using his own funds for this purchase and Amazon is not involved in this deal. According to Forbes magazine, Mr Bezos is worth more than $25bn as at March 2013.
He has however not spoken on his plans for the paper, saying only that “there would be change with or without new ownership”.
“I don’t want to imply that I have a worked-out plan,” he said. “This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation. The key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of the Post do not need changing,” he told the newspaper. “The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”
The Washington Post is the most widely circulated newspaper published in Washington, D.C., and oldest extant in the area, founded in 1877. The newspaper is owned by The Washington Post Company, an education and media company that also owns Kaplan, Inc., and many media ventures besides The Post.
The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. This includes six separate Pulitzers awarded in 2008, the second-highest number ever given to a single newspaper in one year. The Post has also received 18 Nieman Fellowships and 368 White House News Photographers Association awards, among others.
One wonders what Jeff Bezos would want to do with the newspaper. There is the likelihood that he may close the newspaper and retain the online site. Whatever he does, there is this feeling that he might succeed with the Post as he has done with Amazon.
