Taps for The Washington Post

So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the rest of us buying a new bicycle.

That’s how far – and how fast – the once mighty Post has fallen. Even so, it’s startling that the Grahams, who have owned the paper for 80 years, have decided to sell. As I write at Think Scotland today, the Graham family has ‘sunk their own flagship the better to save the rest of the fleet’. Their departure from the newspaper business leaves the Sulzbergers, owners of the New York Times, as pretty much the last family-proprietors in the business. And even they may sell. There are, for instance, persistent rumours that Mike Bloomberg may one day try and buy the New York Times.