When the Washington Post’s dynastic owners, the Graham family, sold it to Jeff Bezos for $250m in 2013, journalists hoped the Amazon founder would deliver them from print decline into a bold new future. For a decade, Bezos was the kind of ultra-rich hands-off owner journalists dream of – but the dream is over.
After appointing former Telegraph editor Will Lewis as publisher – prompting a rebellion from the paper’s newsroom that led to a ban on all Post coverage of itself – Bezos has restricted the outlet’s coverage and overseen the departure of dozens of its most experienced staff. The Post’s opinion editor resigned after Bezos said the section in future would only publish articles supporting “personal liberties and free markets”, to be replaced by a 33-year-old from the Economist.
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More than 100 journalists have taken redundancy, including Dan Balz, who
spent 47 years in the newsroom. Just last week, four-time Pulitzer winner Carol Leonnig departed for MSNBC, while fellow Pulitzer winner Jonathan Capehart took a buyout in July.
Now speculation is growing in DC that Bezos will soon decide to offload the unruly paper with a sale. Whether there’ll be anything left worth buying remains an open question.
