Amazon's Jeff Bezos Thinks It Would Be Fun To Run A 'News-Paper'

 
 Well, THAT kind of came out of nowhere; there was some stuff on Twitter about all WaPo staff being summoned to the auditorium, and then suddenly we get the announcement that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos went and bought the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million. Huh.

The purchase does not involve Amazon; it is being financed entirely by Bezos himself. The sale did not include the broader Post Company, which owns Slate,   Foreign Policy, and The Root. 

Please feel free to fill the comments with speculation about how the paper may be influenced by Bezos's personal political views, which lean libertarian, at least according to Reason and to early Amazon investor Nick Hannauer, who is the sort of rich guy we'd rather see running a major paper, if such a thing even exists anymore. (Ha-ha! Your medium is dying!)

Also, in its story announcing the sale, the Post listed some highlights of its history:

Few people were aware that a sale was in the works for the paper, whose reporters have broken such stories as the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandals and disclosures about the National Security Administration’s surveillance program

And few people writing that story were aware that WaPo only started printing the Pentagon Papers five days after the New York Times, to whom Daniel Ellsberg had leaked them, but whatever, yeah, big day for journamalism.

[ WaPo / Slate ]