Jeff Bezos, the exuberant founder of online commerce giant Amazon.com, is coughing up a quarter of a billion dollars to purchase one of America’s most well-respected newspapers.
The Washington Post is being purchased by Bezos for $250 million. As a result, it’s the end of an era for the Graham family’s ownership of the Post, which spanned four generations.
Bezos will reportedly pay cash for the newspaper.
Amazon, it should be noted, will play no part in the deal, which is expected to close by October.
“There will of course be change at the Post over the coming years,” Bezos wrote to Post Co. employees this week. “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. 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.”
Bezos is yet to make his role in the operation clear.
“I won’t be leading the Washington Post day-to-day,” Bezos explains. “I am happily living in ‘the other Washington’ where I have a day job that I love. Besides that, the Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I’m extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on.”
