Just $250 million.

That’s all Jeffrey P. Bezos paid on Monday for The Washington Post, which was once worth several billion dollars.

$70 million. That’s all John Henry paid on Friday for The Boston Globe, a paper The New York Times had acquired for $1.1 billion in 1993.

Next to nothing. That’s what IBT Media paid to buy Newsweek over the weekend from IAC, which itself had paid only $1 plus $40 million in pension obligations to buy it two years ago.

How do you explain the prices that these storied media institutions have been sold for over the last 72 hours?

The answer has little to do with dollars and cents, spreadsheets and valuation metrics. If it did, in truth, the buyers might have paid even less.

If it wasn’t clear that newspapers have become trophies for the wealthy with an interest in journalism or power — or a…