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In 2008 alone, the paper won six Pulitzers, recognized for exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, for its Virginia Tech massacre coverage, its series on private security contractors in Iraq, and more. Perhaps its darkest hour also involved a Pulitzer, won in 1981 for a Janet Cooke story that was fake. Despite the awards of recent years, there was trouble brewing for the business. Buckling from pressures felt throughout the industry in the digital age, the paper saw its paid weekday circulation drop 37 percent from 2002 to last year. Newsroom staff was repeatedly trimmed and some bureaus closed. The newspaper ran an operating loss of $54 million last year. "We had innovated and to my critical eye our innovations had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn't made up for the revenue decline," Don Graham said in his announcement of the sale. "Our answer had to be cost cuts, and we knew there was a limit to that." To Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University historian of the presidency and the press, Watergate was but the most spectacular example of a continuing Post tradition of holding the bureaucracy to account. The paper's recent in-depth account of the structure and spending of the intelligence community and its 2007 series on questionable management operations at the Smithsonian museum complex
-- leading to the resignation of its chief -- came immediately to her mind. "Losing The Washington Post to a distant owner is like losing a trusted relative you rely on for information and a sense of priorities for what is important close to you," Kumar said. "It is a sad, sad day."
In 2008, Katharine Weymouth, Katharine Graham's granddaughter, was named publisher and CEO of The Post, latest and last in the family line. "This has been, this is, and this will continue to be, a family operation," Katharine Graham said. Her words remain true in one sense: The Post goes now to a family, but not hers.
[Associated
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