Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is to buy the Washington Post for $250m, ending an era of family control at a newspaper that played a defining role in US history during the Watergate era but struggled to maintain its influence in the age of online news.
Mr Bezos is making his first foray into print journalism in a personal capacity but the arrival of a deep-pocketed digital entrepreneur could shake up the Post and the wider newspaper sector.
The heirs of family matriarch Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during the Watergate scandal, emphasised the emotional cost of the decision. “This is a day that my family and I never expected to come,” said Katharine Weymouth, the fourth-generation publisher.