The Washington Post
daily broadsheet newspaper in Washington, D.C.

The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area and is considered a newspaper of record in the United States. In 2023, the Post had 130,000 print subscribers and 2.5 million digital subscribers, both ranking third among American newspapers after The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In 2025, the number of print subscribers sank below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years.
Locally known as The Post and informally as WaPo or WP, the paper was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled financially and editorially. In 1933, financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy and revived its health and reputation; his successors Katharine and Phil Graham, Meyer's daughter and son-in-law, bought out several rival publications and continued this work. 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 Committee, which developed into the Watergate scandal and 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 US$250 million.
The newspaper has won 76 Pulitzer Prizes, second only to The New York Times.
The public source identifies “The Washington Post” as daily broadsheet newspaper in Washington, D.C. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Washington, Post and daily.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q166032. VIAF identifies the subject as 189603300. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2025, 1877 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Washington Post” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.