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Publisher of The Washington Post Will Resign

The Washington Post announced on Tuesday that its publisher, Katharine Weymouth, was stepping down, signaling the end of the Graham family’s connection to the newspaper it owned for 80 years before selling it last year to Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Ms. Weymouth will be succeeded by Frederick J. Ryan Jr., the founding chief executive of Politico and a former Reagan administration official. He starts Oct. 1.

Ms. Weymouth, a granddaughter of Katharine Graham, the longtime Washington Post publisher, was the last major link to the family that had taken on a sitting president during the Watergate scandal and transformed the paper into an American institution. Her uncle, Donald E. Graham, was the chairman of The Post before selling to Mr. Bezos, and it was expected that Mr. Bezos would bring in his own publisher to oversee the paper’s business operations.

Since Mr. Bezos paid $250 million for The Post last summer, many had thought he might apply the kind of disruptive and innovative business strategies to the struggling newspaper business that he has demonstrated at Amazon. Under his ownership, the paper has hired dozens of journalists and focused more intently on The Post’s digital enterprise. But Mr. Ryan’s appointment is the first prominent leadership change.

Mr. Ryan, 59, helped start Politico in 2007 along with several Washington Post journalists who created a website focused on politics. He also served as chief operating officer of Politico’s parent company, Allbritton Communications.

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Katharine Weymouth in 2013 under a photo of her grandmother, Katharine Graham, left, and her mother, Lally Weymouth.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times

Reaction to his appointment was mixed in Washington, and in media circles.

“He is a very savvy guy, a very competent guy,” said Bill Lord, who worked closely with Mr. Ryan as the general manager at WJLA-TV, which was owned until recently by Allbritton. “He may be running the business end of things, but he is very friendly to journalists.”

Mr. Ryan used his connections with the Reagan family to help secure Politico’s involvement in presidential primary debates, an important milestone for the new site, said one former Politico staff member. But others who worked closely with him expressed surprise that Mr. Bezos, renowned as an innovative thinker, would appoint a publisher described by many as the quintessential, conventional Washington insider.

At Politico, Mr. Ryan obsessed over the details of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, a celebrity-driven black-tie event attended by the media and politicians, said one former colleague.

And he was generally more involved in Allbritton’s TV business than he was with Politico, current and former staff members said.

Mr. Ryan stepped down from his roles at Politico and Allbritton last year, shortly after Allbritton sold its TV stations.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Ryan said that he had in fact been very closely involved with Politico and had learned much about both traditional print media and digital operations that he hoped to apply at The Post. And he said he viewed the White House Correspondents Dinner as “an important event.”

He and Mr. Bezos, Mr. Ryan said, believe that “shrinking is not going to be the way to success in this very competitive media landscape.” The two plan for The Post to continue growing, he said, and will also focus on technology and on “the reader, and future reader, user and future user” and “how, where, and how often they engage.” He hopes to work closely with Mr. Bezos though “obviously he does have a day job,” he said, referring to Amazon.

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Frederick J. Ryan Jr., the founding chief executive of Politico, will succeed Katharine Weymouth.Credit...John Shinkle/Politico

Mr. Ryan said that he had been appointed after meeting Mr. Bezos through mutual friends. The two had “a number of conversations about the exciting possibilities in the media, the opportunities for the future,” he said, which culminated in his being offered the position. But he declined to specify any timeline, or discuss the process of his succeeding Ms. Weymouth.

Ms. Weymouth, 48, said that she was leaving the paper with mixed emotions. The decision to step aside now was not Ms. Weymouth’s, though she was not dismissed for poor performance, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In a statement, Mr. Bezos said that Ms. Weymouth “has successfully led many new initiatives and assured that the first ownership change of this great institution in 80 years has been done smoothly and without skipping a beat.”

Mr. Bezos and Ms. Weymouth declined requests for interviews.

The move is the end of an era in Washington. The Graham family, which bought The Post in 1933, was known for its unbending support for the paper’s journalism, and for being the center of a social scene, including the political, media, diplomatic and business elite, that spanned both Washington and New York.

In her note to staff members, Ms. Weymouth wrote that it was “time for new leadership. With Jeff Bezos as our new owner, you are already seeing an infusion of energy and ideas. This is just the beginning of a wonderful new chapter for The Post.”

According to a securities filing from the Graham Holdings Company, the name the Graham family company took after selling The Post, Ms. Weymouth had been paid about $2.7 million in bonuses related to the performance and the sale of the newspaper in the last year or so.

Some current and former Washington Post employees lamented the end of the Grahams’ connection to the paper.

“And now, for my own part, I can say that it took me a long time to comprehend that the Graham era at The Post is finally and fully over,” David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, wrote in an essay at The Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday. “The Post under the Grahams was maternal and paternal and uneven and beautifully flawed. But most of all, it was deeply human.”

Eduardo Porter, whose Economic Scene column normally appears on this page, is away.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: After a Year Under Bezos, Last Graham to Leave Post. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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