The Washington Post

For its first half-century the Washington Post was an unremarkable paper in a company town, founded in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins and passed through owners who used it for politics or ran it into the ground. By 1933 it was bankrupt and sold on the courthouse steps. The buyer, bidding anonymously, was Eugene Meyer, a financier who had run the Federal Reserve Board and now wanted a newspaper. He spent years of his own fortune rebuilding it into something worth reading.

Meyer's son-in-law Philip Graham took over in 1946 and bought the rival Times-Herald in 1954, giving the Post the morning field in Washington. When Graham died by suicide in 1963 the paper passed to Meyer's daughter, Katharine Graham, who had spent two decades as a publisher's wife and had no expectation of running anything. She hired Benjamin Bradlee as executive editor in 1965 and gave him money and room, and the newsroom she inherited became a national one.

Two decisions defined her tenure. In June 1971 the Post joined the New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, over lawyers who warned that a criminal indictment could cost the company the television licenses it depended on. Then, through 1972 and 1973, she backed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate reporting while the Nixon administration attacked the paper and most of the press stayed away from the story. The reporting held up, the Post took the 1973 Pulitzer gold medal for public service, and the presidency ended in resignation.

The Post's later history followed the industry down. Circulation and advertising fell, the paper cut staff and closed bureaus, and in 2013 the Graham family sold it to Jeff Bezos for 250 million dollars — a private purchase, not an Amazon acquisition. The money bought engineers and reporters and a period of growth, followed by renewed losses and turmoil over the paper's direction. What Katharine Graham's Post established, though, was a standing claim that the press in the capital is there to check the government it covers.