After an 81-year run, the Graham family is out of the Washington Post.
The last family member, publisher Katharine Weymouth, left Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the paper’s current owner, announced.
Bezos, the Amazon boss who purchased the daily in August 2013 for $250 million, named Fred Ryan, a former president of Allbritton Media — the company that backed digital political news operation Politico, now seen as formidable rival inside the Beltway — as her replacement.
Weymouth’s great-grandfather, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in 1933. She is the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, who presided over the paper during its Watergate investigations in the 1970s.
Before the sale to Bezos, many had presumed Weymouth was the heir apparent to Donald Graham. Instead, realizing that he did not have the resources to invest in a transformation, Graham sold to Bezos.
On Tuesday, Ryan signaled that he was not going to change editors. He heaped praise on the current top editor, Martin Baron.
Baron spoke with Media Ink long enough to say he was not answering any questions.
Bezos has talked about giving the paper the “runway” to push its digital agenda.
Reed Phillips, an investment banker at DeSilva+Phillips, said, “It sounds like the Washington Post is going to be looking at a whole new business model.”
The paper has traditionally been seen as closer to Democratic administrations going back to the days when its top editor, Ben Bradlee, was a friend of John F. Kennedy.
Ryan is a lawyer who earlier in his career rose to become a top aide to Ronald Reagan. After the Republican left office, Ryan was an organizer of the drive to build Reagan’s presidential library.
In an interview in the WaPo, Ryan said he did not intend to change Baron or the paper’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, and pledged further investment.
“This is not a case where a hedge fund owns a company and they have a short horizon,” he said in the story, part of an address to the newsroom. “This is somebody where they said they are in it for the long game.”