The Washington Post is a daily newspaper based in Washington, D.C. It is the United States’ eighth-largest newspaper as of 2012 and its second-largest newspaper website as of 2011.
The paper was founded in 1877 and was in the hands of the Meyer-Graham family from 1933 to 2013, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought it for $250 million. Under the Grahams, the paper was owned by The Washington Post Co., whose chairman and CEO was Donald Graham. The company, which is now separate from the paper and was renamed Graham Holdings Company after the sale, also owns the Kaplan education business, the Slate Group, a cable division, six local TV stations, a hospice firm, and a boiler producer, and is an investor in the religious site FaithStreet.
While the Post is also a local newspaper, it has specialized in national politics, developing a reputation as one of America’s leading political journalism institutions, particularly since its coverage of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. It has won more than 50 Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other prestigious journalism awards since then. The Post has also, however, periodically received criticism for not emphasizing its local coverage enough, and for emphasizing it too much.
During the last several years, the Post has faced some financial difficulties, making significant newsroom staff reductions and closing all of its domestic bureaus. Though The Washington Post Co. remains profitable its newspaper division lost money in 2009 and 2010, and questions around its Kaplan unit, which accounts for a substantial part of its overall revenue, resulted in a decline in revenue in 2011. In 2013, the company expanded its polling division into an independent polling group doing poll research for outside clients. The Post has an events division called Washington Post Live, launched in 2011, that hosted 20 to 30 events per year as of 2014.
The Post employed an ombudsman from the early 1960s, through 2013, when it eliminated the position in favor of a “reader representative” who solely responds to reader inquiries and complaints.
Shortly after Bezos bought the paper, The Post announced a major expansion in 2014, including the addition of numerous new jobs, revamped sections, and a new breaking news desk. Within four months, it had hired 50 new staffers.
Digital media efforts
The Post launched its website in 1996 as a separate operation from its print product, with offices in Virginia. For 13 years, the two newsrooms operated in what some called a tense partnership before merging on Jan. 1, 2010. In 2014, the Post opened a tech design and development office in New York called WPNYC.
In 2005, the Post’s parent company acquired Slate, the online magazine, from Microsoft. The Post and Slate split when Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013.
The Post was among the first U.S. news sites to conduct regular live online chats, and it also won the first Emmy for online news video in 2006. It has also made significant investments in various forms of research and development since then.
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is an American radio producer and distributor that specializes in news, public affairs, and cultural programming. NPR was launched in 1970 as a collaboration among the nation’s public-broadcasting stations. It is not a radio station itself, but instead a central news organization that produces, licenses, and distributes a variety of…
Some rights reserved.