LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The Washington Post has had a tumultuous week. On Wednesday, the paper's top editor laid off more than 300 of its journalists. Last Saturday, its publisher abruptly announced his departure. Now the storied paper's future lies firmly in the hands of its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has been covering all of this and joins us now. Good morning, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: OK. So who's leading the paper now?
FOLKENFLIK: So Bezos named the paper's pretty new CFO. His name's Jeff D'Onofrio. He's the acting CEO. He gave a statement talking about his long-standing respect and admiration for not only the vitality and future of its journalism, but the critical role it plays in our society. He and Bezos say that they'll use consumer data to drive decisions. That is metrics. And those metrics appear to have driven the decisions of the past week and those layoffs we talked about. Executive editor Matt Murray preserved coverage of national security and national policy, basically ditching sports and books, gutting international coverage and metro, too.
FADEL: How does the staff feel about publisher and CEO Will Lewis leaving?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it's pretty binary. It's relief or delight or perhaps both. But there's also a lot of anger at two years of what they feel are empty promises. Lewis' innovations didn't reverse the paper's fortunes financially and didn't amount to much. He hasn't addressed the staff - the newsroom, anyway - since June of 2024, at least not directly, after questions had been raised about his ethics. And he didn't even show up to announce these cuts with the executive editor, after which - the day after which a former staffer at the Post took a picture of Lewis the Super Bowl the next night in the Bay Area on the red carpet for an event there. It was the last straw for many staffers I talked to and appears to have been the last straw for Bezos as well.
FADEL: Bezos bought the paper in 2013. How responsible is he for what's happened, and what is he trying to achieve?
FOLKENFLIK: So let's first start and give him credit. He bought the paper when it's in similarly brutal times. He invests a lot of money in the newsroom, a lot of money in the business development. And the paper, according to Marty Baron, the former executive editor, made money for six straight years. And then after President Trump turned from office, that Trump went away and so did a lot of those profits.
The paper lost, according to Will Lewis, the former publisher, tens of millions of dollars, at one point reaching hundred millions. Bezos, despite his mass, you know, business interest, never interfered in news coverage. So that deserves a fair amount of credit, too, but you got to say, he picked two CEOs in a row who failed to meet the moment. Bezos then made a couple decisions on his own that really had an effect.
He killed a planted endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the 2024 race, he said to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. And then he also radically transformed the paper's editorial and opinion section in February of last year, both in ways that seemed to turn toward Trump and away from its traditions. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled, about 15%. And Bezos has been AWOL during these cuts as well.
FADEL: So what's the strategy now?
FOLKENFLIK: I don't think we've seen one emerge yet. The question is, who is the Post? What does it represent? Or who are their competitors that it used to compete with? The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal nationally, maybe the Baltimore Sun regionally. Now, is it those hyper-focused on politics, policy and personalities of federal Washington, like Politico, Axios and Vox? Some of them were founded by former Posties.
In his memoir, Marty Baron said Bezos told him the paper had to be driven by data but that principles trump metrics. Right now, people are wondering from Jeff Bezos, what are those principles that are driving him when they do so?
FADEL: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thank you, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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