The Washington Post facts for kids
| Democracy Dies in Darkness | |
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Front page for June 10, 2020
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | Nash Holdings |
| Founder(s) | Stilson Hutchins |
| Publisher | William Lewis |
| Founded | December 6, 1877 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | One Franklin Square, 1301 K Street NW, Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Country | United States |
| Circulation | 139,232 average print circulation |
| ISSN | 0190-8286 |
| OCLC number | 2269358 |
The Washington Post, locally known as "the Post" and, informally, WaPo or WP, is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area and has a national audience.
The Post was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation; this work was continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The Post's 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the investigation into the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters that developed into the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. In October 2013, the Graham family sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a holding company owned by Jeff Bezos, for $250 million.
As of 2023, the newspaper had won the Pulitzer Prize 73 times for its work, the second-most of any publication (after The New York Times). It is considered a newspaper of record in the U.S. Post journalists have received 18 Nieman Fellowships and 368 White House News Photographers Association awards. The paper is well known for its political reporting and is one of the few remaining American newspapers to operate foreign bureaus, with international breaking news hubs in London and Seoul.
Contents
Overview
The Washington Post is regarded as one of the leading daily American newspapers along with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. The Post has distinguished itself through its political reporting on the workings of the White House, Congress, and other aspects of the U.S. government. It is considered a newspaper of record in the U.S.
The Washington Post does not print an edition for distribution away from the East Coast. In 2009, the newspaper ceased publication of its National Weekly Edition due to shrinking circulation. The majority of its newsprint readership is in Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.
The newspaper's 21 current foreign bureaus are in Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Dakar, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toronto. In November 2009, the newspaper announced the closure of three U.S. regional bureaus in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, as part of an increased focus on Washington, D.C.-based political stories and local news. The newspaper has local bureaus in Maryland (Annapolis, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, and Southern Maryland) and Virginia (Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun County, Richmond, and Prince William County).
As of March 2023, the Post's average printed weekday circulation is 139,232, making it the third largest newspaper in the country by circulation.
For many decades, the Post had its main office at 1150 15th Street NW. This real estate remained with Graham Holdings when the newspaper was sold to Jeff Bezos' Nash Holdings in 2013. Graham Holdings sold 1150 15th Street, along with 1515 L Street, 1523 L Street, and land beneath 1100 15th Street, for $159 million in November 2013. The Post continued to lease space at 1150 L Street NW. In May 2014, The Post leased the west tower of One Franklin Square, a high-rise building at 1301 K Street NW in Washington, D.C.
Mary Jordan was the founding editor, head of content, and moderator for Washington Post Live, The Post's editorial events business, which organizes political debates, conferences and news events for the media company, including "The 40th Anniversary of Watergate" in June 2012 that featured key Watergate figures including former White House counsel John Dean, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which was held at the Watergate hotel. Regular hosts include Frances Stead Sellers. Lois Romano was formerly the editor of Washington Post Live.
The Post has its own exclusive Zip Code, 20071.
Publishing service
Arc XP is a department of The Washington Post, which provides a publishing system and software for news organizations such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
History
Founding and early period
The newspaper was founded in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins (1838–1912), and in 1880 it added a Sunday edition, becoming the city's first newspaper to publish seven days a week.
19th century
In April 1878, about four months into publication, The Washington Post purchased The Washington Union, a competing newspaper which was founded by John Lynch in late 1877. The Union had only been in operation about six months at the time of the acquisition. The combined newspaper was published from the Globe Building as The Washington Post and Union beginning on April 15, 1878, with a circulation of 13,000. The Post and Union name was used about two weeks until April 29, 1878, returning to the original masthead the following day.
In 1889, Hutchins sold the newspaper to Frank Hatton, a former Postmaster General, and Beriah Wilkins, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio. To promote the newspaper, the new owners requested the leader of the United States Marine Band, John Philip Sousa, to compose a march for the newspaper's essay contest awards ceremony. Sousa composed "The Washington Post". It became the standard music to accompany the two-step, a late 19th-century dance craze, and remains one of Sousa's best-known works.
In 1893, the newspaper moved to a building at 14th and E streets NW, where it would remain until 1950. This building combined all functions of the newspaper into one headquarters – newsroom, advertising, typesetting, and printing – that ran 24 hours per day.
In 1898, during the Spanish–American War, the Post printed Clifford K. Berryman's classic illustration Remember the Maine, which became the battle-cry for American sailors during the War. In 1902, Berryman published another famous cartoon in the Post – Drawing the Line in Mississippi. This cartoon depicts President Theodore Roosevelt showing compassion for a small bear cub and inspired New York store owner Morris Michtom to create the teddy bear. Wilkins acquired Hatton's share of the newspaper in 1894 at Hatton's death.
20th century
After Wilkins' death in 1903, his sons John and Robert ran the Post for two years before selling it in 1905 to John Roll McLean, owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. During the Wilson presidency, the Post was credited with the "most famous newspaper typo" in D.C. history according to Reason magazine; the Post intended to report that President Wilson had been "entertaining" his future-wife Mrs. Galt, but instead wrote that he had been "entering" Mrs. Galt.
When McLean died in 1916, he put the newspaper in a trust, having little faith that his son Edward "Ned" McLean could manage it as part of his inheritance. Ned went to court and broke the trust, but, under his management, the newspaper slumped toward ruin. He bled the paper for his lavish lifestyle and used it to promote political agendas.
During the Red Summer of 1919 the Post supported the white mobs and even ran a front-page story which advertised the location at which white servicemen were planning to meet to carry out attacks on black Washingtonians.
In 1929, financier Eugene Meyer, who had run the War Finance Corp. since World War I, secretly made an offer of $5 million for the Post, but he was rebuffed by Ned McLean. On June 1, 1933, Meyer bought the paper at a bankruptcy auction for $825,000 three weeks after stepping down as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He had bid anonymously, and was prepared to go up to $2 million, far higher than the other bidders. These included William Randolph Hearst, who had long hoped to shut down the ailing Post to benefit his own Washington newspaper presence.
The Post's health and reputation were restored under Meyer's ownership. In 1946, he was succeeded as publisher by his son-in-law, Philip Graham. Meyer eventually gained the last laugh over Hearst, who had owned the old Washington Times and the Herald before their 1939 merger that formed the Times-Herald. This was in turn bought by and merged into the Post in 1954. The combined paper was officially named The Washington Post and Times-Herald until 1973, although the Times-Herald portion of the nameplate became less and less prominent over time.
The merger left the Post with two remaining local competitors, the Washington Star (Evening Star) and The Washington Daily News. In 1972, the two competitors merged, forming the Washington Star-News.
Following Graham's death in 1963, control of The Washington Post Company passed to his wife, Katharine Graham (1917–2001), who was also Eugene Meyer's daughter. Few women had run prominent national newspapers in the United States. Katharine Graham described her own anxiety and lack of confidence as she stepped into a leadership role in her autobiography. She served as publisher from 1969 to 1979.
Graham took The Washington Post Company public on June 15, 1971, in the midst of the Pentagon Papers controversy. A total of 1,294,000 shares were offered to the public at $26 per share. By the end of Graham's tenure as CEO in 1991, the stock was worth $888 per share, not counting the effect of an intermediate 4:1 stock split.
Graham also oversaw the Post company's diversification purchase of the for-profit education and training company Kaplan, Inc. for $40 million in 1984. Twenty years later, Kaplan had surpassed the Post newspaper as the company's leading contributor to income, and by 2010 Kaplan accounted for more than 60% of the entire company revenue stream.
Executive editor Ben Bradlee put the newspaper's reputation and resources behind reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who, in a long series of articles, chipped away at the story behind the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. The Post's dogged coverage of the story, the outcome of which ultimately played a major role in the resignation of President Richard Nixon, won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In 1972, the "Book World" section was introduced with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William McPherson as its first editor. It featured Pulitzer Prize-winning critics such as Jonathan Yardley and Michael Dirda, the latter of whom established his career as a critic at the Post. In 2009, after 37 years, with great reader outcries and protest, The Washington Post Book World as a standalone insert was discontinued, the last issue being Sunday, February 15, 2009, along with a general reorganization of the paper, such as placing the Sunday editorials on the back page of the main front section rather than the "Outlook" section and distributing some other locally oriented "op-ed" letters and commentaries in other sections. However, book reviews are still published in the Outlook section on Sundays and in the Style section the rest of the week, as well as online.
In 1975, the pressmen's union went on strike. The Post hired replacement workers to replace the pressmen's union, and other unions returned to work in February 1976.
Donald E. Graham, Katharine's son, succeeded her as a publisher in 1979.
In 1995, the domain name washingtonpost.com was purchased. That same year, a failed effort to create an online news repository called Digital Ink launched. The following year it was shut down and the first website was launched in June 1996.
Jeff Bezos era (2013–present)
In late September 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and other local publications, websites, and real estate for US$250 million, transferring ownership to Nash Holdings LLC, Bezos's private investment company. The paper's former parent company, which retained some other assets such as Kaplan and a group of TV stations, was renamed Graham Holdings shortly after the sale.
Nash Holdings, which includes the Post, is operated separately from technology company Amazon, which Bezos founded and where he is as of 2022[update] executive chairman and the largest single shareholder, with 12.7% of voting rights.
Bezos said he has a vision that recreates "the 'daily ritual' of reading the Post as a bundle, not merely a series of individual stories..." He has been described as a "hands-off owner", holding teleconference calls with executive editor Martin Baron every two weeks. Bezos appointed Fred Ryan (founder and CEO of Politico) to serve as publisher and chief executive officer. This signaled Bezos' intent to shift the Post to a more digital focus with a national and global readership.
In 2015, the Post moved from the building it owned at 1150 15th Street to a leased space three blocks away at One Franklin Square on K Street. Since 2014 the Post launched an online personal finance section, a blog, and a podcast with a retro theme. The Post won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for News & Politics in the Social and Web categories.
In 2017, the newspaper hired Jamal Khashoggi as a columnist. In 2018, Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul.
In October 2023, the Post announced it would cut 240 jobs across the organization by offering voluntary separation packages to employees. In a staff-wide email announcing the job cuts, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer wrote, "Our prior projections for traffic, subscriptions and advertising growth for the past two years — and into 2024 — have been overly optimistic". The Post has lost around 500,000 subscribers since the end of 2020 and was set to lose $100 million in 2023, according to The New York Times. The layoffs prompted Dan Froomkin of Presswatchers to suggest that the decline in readership could be reversed by focusing on the rise of authoritarianism (in a fashion similar to the role the Post played during the Watergate scandal) instead of staying strictly neutral, which Froomkin says places the paper into an undistinguished secondary role in competition with other contemporary media.
In November 2023, the Post joined with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Paper Trail Media and 69 media partners including Distributed Denial of Secrets and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories to produce the 'Cyprus Confidential' report on the financial network which supports the regime of Vladimir Putin, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned. Government officials including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides and European lawmakers began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours, calling for reforms and launching probes.
Political stance
20th century
In 1933, financier Eugene Meyer bought the bankrupt Post, and assured the public that neither he nor the newspaper would be beholden to any political party. But as a leading Republican who had been appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Herbert Hoover in 1930, his opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal colored the paper's editorials and news coverage, including editorializing news stories written by Meyer under a pseudonym. His wife Agnes Ernst Meyer was a journalist from the other end of the spectrum politically. The Post ran many of her pieces including tributes to her personal friends John Dewey and Saul Alinsky.
In 1946, Meyer was appointed head of World Bank, and he named his son-in-law Phil Graham to succeed him as Post publisher. The post-war years saw the developing friendship of Phil and Kay Graham with the Kennedys, the Bradlees and the rest of the "Georgetown Set" (many Harvard alumni) that would color the Post's political orientation. Kay Graham's most memorable Georgetown soirée guest list included British diplomat/communist spy Donald Maclean.
The Post is credited with coining the term "McCarthyism" in a 1950 editorial cartoon by Herbert Block. Depicting buckets of tar, it made fun of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's "tarring" tactics, i.e., smear campaigns and character assassination against those targeted by his accusations. Sen. McCarthy was attempting to do for the Senate what the House Un-American Activities Committee had been doing for years—investigating Soviet espionage in America. The HUAC made Richard Nixon nationally known for his role in the Hiss/Chambers case that exposed communist spying in the State Department. The committee had evolved from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the 1930s.
Phil Graham's friendship with John F. Kennedy remained strong until their deaths in 1963. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly told the new President Lyndon B. Johnson, "I don't have much influence with the Post because I frankly don't read it. I view it like the Daily Worker."
Ben Bradlee became the editor-in-chief in 1968, and Kay Graham officially became the publisher in 1969, paving the way for the aggressive reporting of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals. The Post strengthened public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 when it published the Pentagon Papers. In the mid-1970s, some conservatives referred to the Post as "Pravda on the Potomac" because of its perceived left-wing bias in both reporting and editorials. Since then, the appellation has been used by both liberal and conservative critics of the newspaper.
21st century
In the PBS documentary Buying the War, journalist Bill Moyers said in the year prior to the Iraq War there were 27 editorials supporting the Bush administration's desire to invade Iraq. National security correspondent Walter Pincus reported that he had been ordered to cease his reports that were critical of the administration. According to author and journalist Greg Mitchell: "By the Post's own admission, in the months before the war, it ran more than 140 stories on its front page promoting the war, while contrary information got lost".
On March 23, 2007, Chris Matthews said on his television program, "The Washington Post is not the liberal newspaper it was [...] I have been reading it for years and it is a neocon newspaper". It has regularly published a mixture of op-ed columnists, with some of them left-leaning (including E. J. Dionne, Dana Milbank, Greg Sargent, and Eugene Robinson), and some of them right-leaning (including George Will, Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer).
Responding to criticism of the newspaper's coverage during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, former Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote: "The opinion pages have strong conservative voices; the editorial board includes centrists and conservatives; and there were editorials critical of Obama. Yet opinion was still weighted toward Obama." According to a 2009 Oxford University Press book by Richard Davis on the impact of blogs on American politics, liberal bloggers link to The Washington Post and The New York Times more often than other major newspapers; however, conservative bloggers also link predominantly to liberal newspapers.
Since 2011, the Post has been running a column called "The Fact Checker" that the Post describes as a "truth squad". The Fact Checker received a $250,000 grant from Google News Initiative/YouTube to expand production of video fact checks.
In mid-September 2016, Matthew Ingram of Forbes joined Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, and Trevor Timm of The Guardian in criticizing The Washington Post for "demanding that [former National Security Agency contractor Edward] Snowden ... stand trial on espionage charges".
In February 2017, the Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for its masthead.
Political endorsements
In the vast majority of U.S. elections, for federal, state, and local office, the Post editorial board has endorsed Democratic candidates. The paper's editorial board and endorsement decision-making are separate from newsroom operations. Until 1976, the Post did not regularly make endorsements in presidential elections. Since it endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Post has endorsed Democrats in presidential elections, and has never endorsed a Republican for president in the general election, although in the 1988 presidential election, the Post declined to endorse either Governor Michael Dukakis (the Democratic candidate) or Vice President George H. W. Bush (the Republican candidate). The Post editorial board endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012; Hillary Clinton in 2016; and Joe Biden for 2020.
While the newspaper predominantly endorses Democrats in congressional, state, and local elections, it has occasionally endorsed Republican candidates. While the paper has not endorsed Republican candidates for governor of Virginia, it endorsed Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich's unsuccessful bid for a second term in 2006. In 2006, it repeated its historic endorsements of every Republican incumbent for Congress in Northern Virginia. The Post editorial board endorsed Virginia's Republican U.S. Senator John Warner in his Senate reelection campaign in 1990, 1996 and 2002; the paper's most recent endorsement of a Maryland Republican for U.S. Senate was in the 1980s, when the paper endorsed Senator Charlies "Mac" Mathias Jr. In U.S. House of Representatives elections, moderate Republicans in Virginia and Maryland, including Wayne Gilchrest, Thomas M. Davis, and Frank Wolf, have enjoyed the support of the Post; the Post also endorsed Republican Carol Schwartz in her campaign in Washington, D.C.
Executive officers and editors
Major stockholders
- Stilson Hutchins (1877–1889)
- Frank Hatton and Beriah Wilkins (1889–1905)
- John R. McLean (1905–1916)
- Edward (Ned) McLean (1916–1933)
- Eugene Meyer (1933–1948)
- The Washington Post Company (1948–2013)
- Nash Holdings (Jeff Bezos) (2013–present)
Publishers
- Stilson Hutchins (1877–1889)
- Beriah Wilkins (1889–1905)
- John R. McLean (1905–1916)
- Edward (Ned) McLean (1916–1933)
- Eugene Meyer (1933–1946)
- Philip L. Graham (1946–1961)
- John W. Sweeterman (1961–1968)
- Katharine Graham (1969–1979)
- Donald E. Graham (1979–2000)
- Boisfeuillet Jones Jr. (2000–2008)
- Katharine Weymouth (2008–2014)
- Frederick J. Ryan Jr. (2014–2023)
- William Lewis (2024–present)
Executive editors
- James Russell Wiggins (1955–1968)
- Ben Bradlee (1968–1991)
- Leonard Downie Jr. (1991–2008)
- Marcus Brauchli (2008–2012)
- Martin Baron (2012–2021)
- Sally Buzbee (2021–present)
See also
In Spanish: The Washington Post para niños
- 1975–76 Washington Post pressmen's strike
- All the President's Men, a 1974 book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about the Watergate scandal
- All the President's Men, a 1976 film based on Bernstein's and Woodward's book
- List of prizes won by The Washington Post
- The Post, a 2017 film based on the publication of the Pentagon Papers
- The Washington Star (1852–1981)
- The Washington Times (1982–present)
