Donald Graham, grandson of Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post during the Great Depression in 1933, stunned the US media industry Monday, announcing the sale of the storied title to Bezos for $250 million.
Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co., had given no hint that the newspaper of record for the nation's capital was up for sale, despite sinking earnings and plunging subscriptions.
But he made clear that it was the formidable challenge of the Internet to traditional publishing that brought about the deal, after annual operating losses more than doubled to $53.7 million last year and were $14.8 million in the second quarter of this year.
Graham admitted that he and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, "have no answers" to the challenge the newspaper faces, after seven years of falling revenues.
"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," Graham said in a statement.
"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."
Multi-billionaire Bezos, who created Amazon, which has soared in a few years to a dominant position in online retailing, said he was buying the Post in his personal capacity and hoped to shepherd it through the evolution away from traditional newsprint.
"The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs," he said in a statement to Post employees.
"There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."
The deal involves only the newspaper assets of the Washington Post Co., including its free commuter daily The Express, the Spanish language newspaper El Tiempo Latino, and Robinson Terminal, a warehouse asset.
The Washington Post Co. will retain the large educational testing service Kaplan, Foreign Policy magazine, Slate.com, and a cable television operation, as well as the Post's downtown Washington headquarters.
Weymouth, granddaughter of legendary post publisher Katharine Graham, will stay on as the newspaper's CEO and publisher, Bezos said, along with other top management.
She said in a statement to readers that she and her family had never expected to sell the newspaper they had owned for eight decades, during which its reporters, editorialists and world-famous columnists have wielded huge influence over the White House and Congress.
The Post is best known for its Watergate reporting, in which legendary journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed lawbreaking by the White House of Richard Nixon, leading to the president's 1974 resignation.
The paper's reporting has built and demolished the careers of numerous politicians, and helped make and break the policies of successive White Houses, on both sides of the political spectrum.
Most recently the Post broke together with Britain's Guardian the story of the US National Security Agency's extensive domestic and global spying operations.
Even so, circulation has steadily sunk at the newspaper, falling 8.6 percent last year and at a 7.1 percent rate for the first half of 2012, to around 448,000 daily.
The decision to sell was made "with a heavy heart," Weymouth said.
But it was decided "with an absolute conviction that Mr. Bezos' ownership represents a unique and extraordinary opportunity for The Washington Post" as well as for readers.
She called Bezos "a proven entrepreneur" who "takes the long-term view in his investments."
"While he expects The Post to remain profitable, his focus is on the essential role that our journalism has on dialogue and the flow of information in our society."
The sale underscored the desperation of the US newspaper industry for new cash support to survive the rapid transition of the news business to the Internet, where much of the news remains free. The Post, like several leading US newspapers, recently erected a paywall on its website.
The stunning announcement came just days after the New York Times sold the Boston Globe newspaper for just $70 million to the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, 20 years after paying $1.1 billion for the paper.
Like the Post, the Globe had been bleeding subscribers to its physical newspaper and has been challenged to persuade consumers to pay to read it online.
The Times sold it even while retaining pension obligations to the Globe's employees.
And in July another US media giant, the Tribune Company, split off its newspaper holdings, including the sagging Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, into a separate company, with management clearly focused on the company's more profitable television stations.
