End of an era as Graham family bows out of The Washington Post

In late 2012, Donald Graham, the chief executive of the Washington Post, met with the paper's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, to look at the paper's future for the next three years. Their assessment troubled them. "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. With the agreement of the board, the company retained Allen & Co and had an initial round of discussions with six potential buyers. Then in July, at Allen's annual Sun Valley conference, Graham met with one of them, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. com. Mr Graham liked what he heard.

“It was clear to me that he wanted to buy the newspaper for the right reasons, that he understood what newspapers do and what this newspaper in particular is important and that he would be willing to stand up for it,” Mr Graham said in a phone call. “Like any business person would, I have sought his advice over the years and have always been impressed by his decency and thoughtfulness.”

So after 80 years of family control and editorial leadership by the Graham family, the Post changed ownership yesterday, when Mr Bezos bought it for $250 million (€188 million). In selling to Mr Bezos, the Grahams left the Sulzbergers, who own 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). It also ends a kind of special relationship the paper has had with the nation’s capital. Washington has been through all manner of tumult and change in the last eight decades, with years of racial strife, the resignation of a sitting president, a terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the evaporation of a bipartisan political process.

But through it all, the Washington Post has been a source of constancy and coverage, a center of gravity and a force in the civic, social and cultural life of a city where many others came and went. As Mr Graham rode down in the elevator to the newsroom for the announcement of the sale, some of the paper’s reporters rode with him. One asked: “Is this bad?” Mr Graham shook his head, saying that, in the end, he thought the as-yet-undisclosed announcement would be good news for the paper.

Kevin Sullivan, a friend of the family, watched as Mr Graham told the newsroom of the sale. “There’s huge love for the Graham family and everybody feels sad that they are no longer going to be running the place - that’s obvious,” he said. “But there is this real sense that if Don Graham thinks this is a good idea, then I think it’s a good idea.”

The Grahams’ resolve to retain ownership was wilted by an industrial cataclysm that laid many newspapers low, and then the Post did some further damage by emphasising a regional approach and responding to a sharp decline in revenues by taking apart its own vaunted newsroom piece by piece. Even as the rest of the industry decided that there was an urgent need to begin charging on the web,tThe Post held out, only recently deciding to join the rest.

For a time, the newspaper was propped up by its education division, Stanley Kaplan, but when that company encountered regulatory and business turbulence, the losses at the newspaper - revenue dropped 44 per cent over the past six years - came into sharp focus.

Still, news of the sale and who was buying it was an unexpected and extraordinary development in the newspaper industry. Given that the Post still has potency as a political symbol, the fact that it could be acquired by a man who made his fortune taking apart book-publishing - another traditional business - served as another example that the center of gravity in the media world has pivoted away from the East Coast.

Technology and its leaders have proved time and again that they can set an agenda based on giving the consumer what they want, not what some politicians, or a newspaper, thinks they need. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the sale is that it happened under the watch of Donald Graham. All scions of industry do their time on the shop-room floor, but Mr Graham had shown that he didn’t want to just inherit his enterprise, he wanted to earn it. He joined the Marines and later the Washington police force to walk a beat before doing his stations in the Post newsroom and on the business side.

He was perhaps not the legend that his mother, Katharine, the longtime publisher, was, but to many he represented a certain kind of stubborn belief that good newspapering was its own end. In the popular imagination, journalism reached its highest and best calling during Watergate, whentThe Post and its determined owner, Katharine Graham, took on a sitting president.

The idea that Donald Graham would sell the paper, whatever merits the sale might entail, seemed as unlikely as Henry V giving up the crown. “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. It was one of the last places where people with very different agendas would set down their weapons and come to talk. That has been disappearing for a long time, but symbolically, this brings an end to that era.”

New York Times