The Washington Post

• 1. Introduction

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  The Washington Post has its own ZIP Code. That single fact captures something essential about a newspaper so embedded in the geography and politics of the American capital that the postal service gave it its own address: 20071. Founded in 1877, The Post has outlasted presidents, survived bankruptcy, changed hands multiple times, and become one of the few American newspapers that still maintains foreign bureaus on several continents. Yet today it is fighting for survival in a way that would have been unthinkable during the years when its reporters brought down a presidency. How did a paper born in financial struggle become a watchdog of American democracy? How did it fall into crisis again? And what does its turbulent story reveal about the relationship between power, money, and the press?

• 2. From Bankruptcy to Dominance

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  Stilson Hutchins founded The Washington Post in 1877, and within three years the paper had added a Sunday edition, making it the city's first newspaper to publish seven days a week. Early ownership passed through Frank Hatton, a former Postmaster General, and Beriah Wilkins, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio. Under their watch, the paper commissioned John Philip Sousa, then leader of the United States Marine Band, to compose a march for its essay contest awards ceremony. Sousa produced "The Washington Post", which became the standard music for the two-step, a late nineteenth-century dance craze, and remains among his best-known compositions.

  John Roll McLean, owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, purchased the paper in 1905. When McLean died in 1916, he placed it in a trust, doubting his son Edward could manage it responsibly. Edward went to court, broke the trust, and proceeded to confirm his father's fears: he drained the paper to fund a lavish personal lifestyle and wielded it for political purposes. By 1929, the paper was slumping toward bankruptcy. Financier Eugene Meyer, who had run the War Finance Corporation since World War I, secretly offered $5 million for it that year and was rebuffed.

  On the 1st of June 1933, three weeks after stepping down as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Meyer bought the Post at a bankruptcy auction for $825,000. He had bid anonymously and was prepared to go as high as $2 million, well above any other bidder. Among those other bidders was William Randolph Hearst, who had long wanted to shut the ailing Post to strengthen his own Washington newspaper presence. Meyer's victory denied Hearst that goal, and it set the Post on a path toward becoming the dominant paper in the capital. By 1954, Meyer's successors had acquired and merged the Times-Herald into the Post, absorbing a competitor Hearst had once owned.

• 3. Katharine Graham's Inheritance

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  Philip Graham, Meyer's son-in-law, succeeded him as publisher in 1946. When Philip Graham died in 1963, control of The Washington Post Company passed to his wife, Katharine Graham, who was also Eugene Meyer's daughter. She described herself as particularly anxious about assuming the role, at a time when few women had run prominent national newspapers in the United States.

  Katharine Graham served as publisher from 1969 to 1979, and her tenure included two of the most consequential decisions in American newspaper history. In 1971, she took The Washington Post Company public, offering 1,294,000 shares at $26 per share, in the middle of the Pentagon Papers controversy. The Post's publication of those classified documents helped build public opposition to the Vietnam War. By the time Graham stepped down as CEO in 1991, the stock that had debuted at $26 was worth $888 per share, not counting the effect of an intermediate four-to-one stock split.

  Graham also oversaw the paper's acquisition of the for-profit education company Kaplan, Inc., for $40 million in 1984. Twenty years later, Kaplan had surpassed the Post newspaper as the company's leading income contributor. By 2010, Kaplan accounted for more than 60% of the entire company's revenue. Her son Donald E. Graham succeeded her as publisher in 1979 and guided the company until the family sold it to Jeff Bezos in 2013.

• 4. Watergate and the Pentagon Papers

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  Executive editor Ben Bradlee, who took the role in 1968, committed the newspaper's reputation and resources to a pair of investigative efforts that defined the Post's public identity for decades. Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the story of a 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. Their long series of articles chipped away at the connections behind that break-in, work that ultimately played a major role in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. The Post's coverage won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

  The Pentagon Papers coverage had come first. The Post published those documents in 1971, strengthening opposition to the Vietnam War. White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, speaking for President Nixon, accused the Post of "shabby journalism" for its Watergate focus. He later apologized when the reporting was proven correct.

  These stories established the Post as a paper willing to challenge the most powerful figures in the country. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had reportedly told President Lyndon B. Johnson that he viewed the paper "like the Daily Worker." Ben Bradlee remained executive editor until 1991, presiding over a newsroom that became a model for aggressive political reporting. The tradition he built would later be invoked by critics who felt the paper had abandoned that standard under later ownership.

• 5. The Bezos Era

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  In August 2013, the Graham family sold The Washington Post and other local publications to Nash Holdings LLC, a private investment company owned by Jeff Bezos, for an amount the source records without specifying the final figure. The building the paper had long occupied at 1150 15th Street NW remained with Graham Holdings; Graham Holdings sold that property along with several adjacent properties in November 2013 for $159 million. The Post moved two years later to leased space at One Franklin Square, at 1301 K Street NW.

  Bezos has been described as a hands-off owner, conducting teleconference calls with executive editor Martin Baron every two weeks. He appointed Fred Ryan, founder and CEO of Politico, to serve as publisher and chief executive officer, signaling an intent to shift the paper toward a digital, national, and global readership. In 2023, the Post carried 130,000 print subscribers and 2.5 million digital subscribers, both ranking third among American newspapers, behind The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

  The paper also hired Jamal Khashoggi as a columnist in 2017. In 2018, Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul. That same year, the Post published an op-ed by Amber Heard, which led to a defamation lawsuit filed in 2019 by Johnny Depp; after a seven-week jury trial, Heard was found liable and Depp received $15 million in damages. In October 2023, the Post announced it would cut 240 jobs by offering voluntary separation packages, with interim CEO Patty Stonesifer citing projections that had been "overly optimistic." The paper was set to lose $100 million in 2023 and had shed around 500,000 subscribers since the end of 2020.

• 6. Editorial Independence Under Pressure

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  Eleven days before the 2024 presidential election, CEO and publisher William Lewis announced that the Post would not endorse a candidate, ending a run of Democratic endorsements that stretched back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Sources familiar with the situation stated that the Post editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris but that it had been blocked by Jeff Bezos. Former executive editor Martin Baron called the decision "disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage" and suggested Bezos was fearing retaliation from Donald Trump that could affect Bezos's other businesses.

  More than 250,000 people cancelled their subscriptions in the wake of the announcement, roughly ten percent of the paper's subscriber base. Three members of the editorial board left, though they remained with the Post in other roles. Opinion columnist and editor Robert Kagan and columnist Michele Norris resigned. The paper's humorist Alexandra Petri published an endorsement of Harris anyway, writing that "I only know what's happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there's no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear."

  In January 2025, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned, saying the paper had refused to run her cartoon criticizing the relationship between American billionaires and President Trump, a decision she called "dangerous for a free press." The following month, Bezos announced that the paper's opinion section would publish only pieces supporting personal liberties and free markets. Opinion editor David Shipley resigned after trying to persuade Bezos to reconsider. Within two days of that announcement, more than 75,000 additional digital subscribers cancelled. Opinion columnist Ruth Marcus resigned after publisher Will Lewis killed her column criticizing the new direction, ending her forty-year tenure at the newspaper.

• 7. Crisis and Contraction

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  On the 4th of February 2026, the Post announced that around 300 employees would be laid off. The paper's sports and books coverage were expected to close entirely, and local news coverage would be substantially cut. The daily news podcast "Post Reports", which had run for seven years, was suspended. Several foreign bureaus were closed, and at least one correspondent in Ukraine was laid off. According to reporting in The New York Times, more than 60,000 readers cancelled their digital subscriptions in the week that followed. Print subscribers had already fallen below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years.

  The layoffs were driven by reported losses of $100 million in 2024, subscriber drops following the paper's refusal to endorse a presidential candidate, and falling search traffic attributed to AI tools. In January 2026, the FBI raided the apartment of Post journalist Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone, two laptops, and a smartwatch as part of a probe into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator with top-secret security clearance. The Post's editorial board called the search an "aggressive attack on the press freedom of all journalists."

  On the 7th of February 2026, Will Lewis stepped down as publisher and was replaced in the interim by Jeff D'Onofrio, who had served as the company's chief financial officer. The Washington Post Guild, the union representing Post employees, welcomed the change in leadership and urged Bezos to "sell the paper to someone willing to invest in its future." The paper had won 76 Pulitzer Prizes over its history, second only to The New York Times, but by early 2026 its journalism staff was smaller than at any point in recent memory, and the question of who would own and shape it next remained unanswered.