N E W S M AT TE R S
Jeff Bezos transforms Washington Post
By Richard J. Levine
A
Richard J. Levine
Richard J. Levine is president
of the board of directors of
the Dow Jones News Fund,
Inc. Since joining Dow Jones
in 1966, he has served as vice
president for news and staff
development, executive editor
of Dow Jones Newswires,
vice president of information
services, editorial director
of electronic publishing and
Washington correspondent
and columnist for The Wall
Street Journal. He holds a B.S.
from Cornell University and
an M.S. from the Columbia
University Graduate School of
Journalism.
Email:
richard.levine@dowjones.com
s a correspondent in The Wall
Street Journal’s Washington
bureau in the 1960s, ‘70s and
early ‘80s, I routinely started my
morning with the Washington Post.
A quick read could make or break my
day. If I had an exclusive in the Journal,
I sipped my coffee with a big smile. If,
however, the Post had beaten me on
an important a story, I faced questions
from unhappy editors and hours
playing catch up.
Back then, the Post, long controlled
by the Graham family and led by
executive editor Ben Bradlee, was a
formidable competitor and highly
profitable newspaper with seemingly
limitless ambition—capable of
helping drive Richard Nixon from the
presidency with its coverage of the
Watergate scandal.
However, the Post lost a good measure
of its fierce energy and direction in
the decades that followed. By 2013,
it had been deeply damaged by the
Internet and the digital revolution. Like
so many other newspapers across the
country, it was facing significant losses
in circulation and advertising and
felt compelled to reduce newsroom
staffing sharply.
Still, nothing prepared Post employees,
leading media observers or the general
public for the announcement in
August of that year that the Graham
family was selling one of the nation’s
leading newspapers and a number
of smaller properties to Jeff Bezos,
founder and CEO of Amazon, for
$250 million in cash. Completed on
Oct. 1, 2013, the transaction put the
once mighty Post in the hands of
a businessman regarded as a true
visionary in the technology industry.
Today, while much
of the newspaper
business is still
groping for a new
business model amid
continuing cutbacks
Jeff Bezos
in editorial staff and
coverage, the Post seems to have
regained much of its old confidence,
drive and sense of purpose, if not
its old financial strength, under the
leadership of Bezos and executive
editor Martin Baron.
In April, the Post staff won the Pulitzer
Prize for national reporting “for its
revelatory initiative in creating and
using a national database to illustrate
how often and why the police shoot to
kill and who the victims are most likely
to be.” This was the second consecutive
year the Post was awarded a Pulitzer
for national reporting.