On the steps of The Washington Post’s building in 1933, lawyers representing media mogul William Randolph Hearst made an $800,000 bid for the newspaper in a bankruptcy auction. An anonymous bidder went to $825,000. Hearst, the epitome of the Gilded Age press baron, dropped out.
The gavel dropped and the struggling Washington Post fell into the hands of Eugene Meyer, who had made millions on Wall Street and later led the Federal Reserve – but had no experience running a paper.
This week, The Washington Post landed in the hands of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, another wealthy man without newspaper experience. Meyer’s descendants threw in the towel after watching the Post’s revenues decline for seven straight years, conceding that they had run out of ideas for how to refit it for a digital future.