Jeff Bezos shelled out a lot of his own money for the well-known newspaper

Aug 6, 2013 06:34 GMT  ·  By

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has just bought the Washington Post for $250 million (€189 million). The tech entrepreneur has had a key role in the evolution of e-commerce as the founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Bezos ranks as the 11th richest individual in the United States according to Forbes and the 19th richest person in the world.

Now, he has bought the Washington Post, one of the most famous American newspapers.

It seems that the Graham family, who has owned the newspaper for the past eight decades, will sell everything to Bezos for a $250 million (€189 million) price tag. Bezos, who has never operated a newspaper, has already sent out a note to his new employers.

According to the message, he will not be interfering with the way the newspaper is run and his political agenda will not be imposed on the reporters. While he said there would be no immediate changes, he mentioned that, over the next few years, there will be some experimenting in the future to better align the paper with the Internet.

“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,” Bezos said.

In his message, the Amazon founder also praised the Graham family for showing the courage required for a journalistic publication, namely to temper their employees and get them to find another source for a news piece since the reputations and livelihoods of individuals are at stake, but also to urge their reporters to follow a story at all costs.

“The values of The Post do not need changing. […] We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely,” Bezos wrote.

As the publication’s chiefs mentioned, there will also be no layoffs among the paper’s staff of 2,000.