The Wall Street Journal sold six years ago for $5 billion; the WaPo is selling for 1/20th of that. That's the direction the newspaper business is headed. It is becoming a boutique business for extremely rich people— a way for them to luxuriate in the prestige, and cultural respect, and political influence that newspapers still command, to some extent. How this shit will turn out is anyone's guess.

Update: As WaPo reporters begin considering the conflicts of interest that will come along with having Bezos as their boss, here is a special one for the paper's vaunted national security desk: Amazon recently landed a $600 million contract to build an entire cloud computing system for the CIA. The company is reportedly staffing up on engineers with top secret clearance. Does Jeff Bezos have top secret clearance? That would be something that the Washington Post might want to think about, considering how much reporting their journalists have done on the topic. A huge CIA contractor is now Dana Priest's boss. Think about that.
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