When the Washington Post's entire staff was summoned by chief executive Donald Graham to a meeting at 4.30pm on Monday, many assumed he was announcing the sale of the newspaper's downtown office, its prize asset.
But what followed was stunning.
Graham announced that the venerable title, owned by his family for four generations and forever associated with its reporting of the Watergate scandal, was being sold to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, for US$250 million ($315m).
"It took a while for someone to utter the first question," said a senior editor who was present. "People were just shocked."
Marc Ambinder of Atlantic magazine mimicked Amazon's automated messages to regular users. "Based on previous purchases, Jeff Bezos, you might also like: the Los Angeles Times, the Orlando Sentinel, Newsweek."
Among the questions that swirled around the Post's newsroom after the bombshell, one recurred: why would a billionaire online retailer want to buy an ailing, fading brand with bags of talent but no business model?
The Washington Post has lost money for seven years or more. Subscriptions have halved over the past 15 to 20 years; small ad revenue has deserted to free internet sites; and new competition has emerged from hungry, comparatively low-cost websites. It's a story of decline repeated across the US among metropolitan daily newspapers.
For the next few years, Bezos is almost guaranteed to lose more money, maybe at the current rate of US$50 million a year. So why has he become the saviour of a major newspaper, spending a small part of the fortune gleaned from the digital world on a relic of old media?
Part of the reason, perhaps, lies in the fact that Bezos is significantly older than, say, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook (there are 20 years between them). Bezos started Amazon from his garage in Seattle in 1994, the year in which the Post launched its website. He is old enough, at 49, to appreciate an ink-on-paper product and announced in a letter to staff that he would uphold the Post's values, adding that the newspaper "should answer to its readers, not its owners".
Bezos paid for the Washington Post from his own pocket - easy enough when you are worth an estimated US$22 billion. This is not a takeover by Amazon, but a highly personal decision. But what will he get out of it?
He's clearly a man who likes a challenge. His biggest non-Amazon venture so far is Blue Origin, a space tourism project which he has declared will let "anybody to go into space". He's building a 10,000-year clock in the wilderness of Texas, the state where he spent much of his youth.
But why not spend his money on a pesky but pliable start-up website that doesn't have the inconvenience of a print works to manage (or shut down), and which might appear to be a better match for the man who gave the world Kindle? There is some kudos left in the Post, for sure. Its crown may have slipped since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon, but its lustre endures, just.
"Everybody will say this is a rich guy looking after his ego, buying a newspaper like rich guys always have, but that is completely wrong," says Michael Wolff, author and publisher of the Newser website. "For him, it's an R&D investment and the costs are very low. Sure it's about power, but guys like this see power differently from the traditional influence that owning a newspaper brings.
"They see it in terms of business leverage, and Amazon monopolises its market, so to me that's clearly his interest. He does not see this as getting into the metro newspaper business, he sees himself as going into the political information business, which he could also monopolise, become the Amazon of politics."
In his letter to the Post's employees, Bezos was adamant he would stay in the "other Washington", the west coast state where his company is still based.
The Graham family, by contrast, are Washingtonians through and through. The legendary salons held by the late Katharine Graham, Donald's mother, formed the city's glittering power circles in the paper's heyday, when it published the Pentagon Papers and unearthed the Watergate scandal. Like his mother was, Donald is in the office most days.
Bezos leads a relatively quiet life by comparison, married to MacKenzie, a writer, with whom he has four children. Like most dotcom billionaires he dresses casually. Regarded as fun and chatty when he does socialise, he is renowned for a laugh that Time magazine, naming him its man of the year in 1999, described as a "rapid honk that sounds like a flock of Canadian geese on nitrous oxide".
Despite geographical and cultural distances, Donald Graham revealed he had been friendly with Bezos for some time, seeking his advice on digital innovations which have failed to turn the Post's fortunes around.
There are concerns he may push Amazon's enthusiasm for avoiding taxes through the paper, but he does not have an overweening political agenda. His politics have been called "West Coast beyondist": a libertarian centrist who wants to move beyond party squabbles. But he has given most of his small campaign donations to Democrats running in Washington state, as well as US$2.5 million towards a campaign that successfully defended its gay marriage law.
A senior editor said amid the shock at losing the Grahams, there was a realisation Bezos might not be a bad thing. "Everyone who works at the Post gets to know Donald and Katharine and that's gone, which is sad. But in terms of buyers there are a lot that could be a lot worse. If he invests, innovates and shows patience, this might not work out too badly."
Bezos has given few clues about his reasons for buying the Washington Post and while a philanthropic desire to save an American institution may be one of them, it is unlikely to loom large. He has said that senior staff will stay in place, but someone so driven by the need to innovate will surely not rest for long. As his letter to the staff said: "There will, of course, be change at the Post over the coming years. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."
Shrinking times
• 750,000 - Washington Post circulation in 2001
• 470,000 - Sales today
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