Jeff Bezos agrees to buy The Washington Post and its other D.C. area papers for $250 million

Wow. Did­n’t see this com­ing:

The Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pa­ny (NYSE: WPO) announced today that it has signed a con­tract to sell its news­pa­per pub­lish­ing busi­ness­es, includ­ing The Wash­ing­ton Post news­pa­per, to Jef­frey P. Bezos.

The pur­chas­er is an enti­ty that belongs to Mr. Bezos in his indi­vid­ual capac­i­ty and is not Amazon.com, Inc.

“Every­one at the Post Com­pa­ny and every­one in our fam­i­ly has always been proud of The Wash­ing­ton Post — of the news­pa­per we pub­lish and of the peo­ple who write and pro­duce it,” said Don­ald E. Gra­ham, Chair­man and CEO of The Wash­ing­ton Post Company.

“I, along with Katharine Wey­mouth and our board of direc­tors, decid­ed to sell only after years of famil­iar news­pa­per-indus­try chal­lenges made us won­der if there might be anoth­er own­er who would be bet­ter for the Post (after a trans­ac­tion that would be in the best inter­est of our share­hold­ers). Jeff Bezos’ proven tech­nol­o­gy and busi­ness genius, his long-term approach and his per­son­al decen­cy make him a unique­ly good new own­er for the Post.”

“I under­stand the crit­i­cal role the Post plays in Wash­ing­ton, DC and our nation, and the Post’s val­ues will not change,” said Mr. Bezos. “Our duty to read­ers will con­tin­ue to be the heart of the Post, and I am very opti­mistic about the future.”

Bezos is one of Amer­i­ca’s best known tech­nol­o­gy CEOs. He found­ed Amazon.com in his garage near­ly twen­ty years ago and has over­seen the com­pa­ny’s growth from a small tech start­up into the world’s fore­most elec­tron­ic retail­er. Ama­zon is one of the Pacif­ic North­west­’s largest pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies, with a mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion of $139 bil­lion, $66.85 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue and 88,550 employees.

Bezos is also one of Wash­ing­ton’s wealth­i­est men. His net worth, as of 2013, is esti­mat­ed to be $25.2 bil­lion. Con­sid­er­ing how large his for­tune is, the price he is pay­ing to acquire The Wash­ing­ton Post and oth­er D.C. news­pa­pers does­n’t seem that high. Accord­ing to a SEC fil­ing spot­ted by Alex Wil­hem of TechCrunch, Bezos’ pur­chas­ing enti­ty (Explore Hold­ings) won’t be respon­si­ble for the pen­sions of for­mer Post employ­ees. So that makes the acqui­si­tion some­what sweet­er for him.

The big ques­tion on the minds of many seems to be: What does Jeff Bezos want with a ven­er­a­ble, strug­gling dai­ly news­pa­per com­pa­ny and its print empire? And what led the Post’s board to con­clude Bezos was the right man to sell the crown jew­el to? (Clear­ly, they’re impressed by his busi­ness acu­men; but Bezos has­n’t been known as some­one inter­est­ed in news­pa­pers or the news busi­ness).

The Post’s Wonkblog writ­ers, for­tu­nate­ly, have had a lot to say about how they feel about the sale, and their com­men­taries have been the best I’ve seen so far.

• Ezra Klein: Some thoughts on The Post being sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos
• Jim Tanker­s­ley: Jour­nal­ism needs a busi­ness mod­el. Can Jeff Bezos find one?
• Neil Irwin: Jeff Bezos is buy­ing The Wash­ing­ton Post. Here’s what that means
• Andrea Peter­son: What hap­pened when Jeff Bezos invest­ed in Busi­ness Insid­er? More journalism.
• Lydia DePil­lis: How the Post could help Amazon

Also worth read­ing are state­ments by Bezos and the Grahams:

• Jeff Bezos on Post purchase
• Let­ter from Don­ald Gra­ham on sale of The Post
• Katharine Wey­mouth’s let­ter to Post readers

And the Post’s reporters have put togeth­er a num­ber of arti­cles about the sale.

• Bezos is known for his patience
• Bezos’s buy harks back to days of the wealthy at news­pa­pers’ helms
• A fam­i­ly syn­ony­mous with The Post and with Washington
• Details of Bezos’ deal to buy Post
• Post sale hailed by busi­ness leaders

The Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pa­ny is retain­ing a num­ber of pub­li­ca­tions and oth­er assets that will not be sold. These include Slate, Kaplan, CableONE, Social­Code, and WaPo Labs. The Com­pa­ny announced that it antic­i­pat­ed renam­ing itself in light of the sale of The Wash­ing­ton Post and oth­er D.C. area papers to Bezos.

The sale large­ly com­pletes the Post Com­pa­ny’s trans­for­ma­tion into an edu­ca­tion­al and inter­ac­tive media busi­ness. It has been unload­ing peri­od­i­cals for years.

Ear­li­er this year, the Post Com­pa­ny sold its prin­ci­pal Pacif­ic North­west asset, The Her­ald of Everett, to Black Press of British Colum­bia. That trans­ac­tion brought an end to a thir­ty-five year relationship.

And in 2010, the com­pa­ny let go of Newsweek, which was then exper­i­men­tal­ly paired up with The Dai­ly Beast by its new own­er Bar­ry Diller.

Newsweek, sad­ly, did not fare well under Diller’s IAC. Its cir­cu­la­tion con­tin­ued to drop, lead­ing to the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of its print edi­tion at the end of 2012.

A few days ago, IAC announced it was sell­ing Newsweek to a new own­er, IBT Media, which pub­lish­es the Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times.

The sale to Bezos at least keeps The Wash­ing­ton Post and its fam­i­ly of D.C. area news­pa­pers out of the hands of a tru­ly unde­sir­able own­er, like media baron Rupert Mur­doch, who is report­ed­ly try­ing to get his hands on the Los Ange­les Times and Chica­go Tri­bune (as are the ultra­wealthy and ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive Koch brothers).

The sale also ends sev­er­al decades of own­er­ship of The Post by the Gra­ham fam­i­ly, although for now, the paper’s cur­rent exec­u­tive team is expect­ed to stay on.

Bezos is not the only bil­lion­aire who has become inter­est­ed in buy­ing news­pa­pers late­ly. Boston Red Sox own­er John Hen­ry agreed to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Com­pa­ny for $70 mil­lion a few days ago, and War­ren Buf­fett has been buy­ing up small town papers by the region­ful.

Buf­fet­t’s com­pa­ny, Berk­shire Hath­away, is the Post Com­pa­ny’s largest share­hold­er, and stands to prof­it from the sale to Bezos.