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'Something I will be most proud of when I’m 90': How Jeff Bezos used to talk about The Washington Post, and what’s changed

Nieman Lab · Laura Hazard Owen · last updated

On February 7, 2019, Jeff Bezos took to Medium to write about The National Enquirer’s publication of his text messages. In a paragraph about halfway through the post, Bezos paused to reflect on his ownership of The Washington Post, which he had acquired in 2013.

“My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving,” he wrote, “is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life.”

Almost exactly seven years later, on February 4, 2026, the Post undertook massive layoffs, cutting a reported 30% of jobs across the organization, including more than 300 from the newsroom.1

Bezos was silent, as he has been for months about the Post. He said nothing publicly when, in January, the FBI raided a Post reporter’s home. The last time I could find that he talked publicly about the paper was in February 2025 when he announced that, moving forward, the paper’s opinion section would focus on “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

On Wednesday I combed past coverage and interviews to compile a collection of the things Bezos has said publicly about the Post since he acquired it in 2013. I’m obviously not inside his head (and he didn’t return my request for comment), but I was struck by something as I read.

I found that Bezos used to speak about The Washington Post with real curiosity, and the things he said were often interesting and specific — even, I dare say, Nieman Labby. On September 4, 2013, he had a meeting with the Post newsroom. In that meeting, he “repeatedly said that the success of the Post depends on its ability to draw readers into a ‘daily ritual habit’ of reading across a collection of different topics — and paying for it. ‘People will buy a package,” Bezos said, ‘they will not pay for a story.’”

This instinct proved to be exactly right. But it was The New York Times that proved it.

Bezos used to appear cornily genuine about the Post. You probably remember #democracydiesindarkness. Bezos championed Marty Baron’s #BadAssReporting in 2016 and celebrated the Post’s WAN-IFRA Digital Media Award for “Best News Website” in 2017. He shouted out the team’s Pulitzer Prize wins on Twitter until 2022. (The Post kept winning Pulitzers, but the shoutouts stopped.)

 

In December 2024, Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed Bezos on stage at a New York Times event, a few weeks after Bezos decided the paper would stop running presidential endorsements and killed its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Post had lost a reported $100 million that year. “Do you have a big idea about how the Post is going to change?” Sorkin asked Bezos.

“I have a bunch of ideas. And I’m working on that right now,” Bezos replied. “And I have a couple of small inventions there. So we’ll see…stay tuned. We’ll see.”

He didn’t share any of the new ideas. “The advantage I bring to the Post is, you know, when they need financial resources, I’m available,” he said. Changing the subject, he said he was “very optimistic” about Donald Trump’s second term: “He is calmer than he was the first time, and more confident, more settled.”

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Post, wrote Wednesday that February 4, 2026 was “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” Baron went on to add:

“I remain personally grateful for Jeff Bezos’s steadfast support and confidence during my eight-plus years as The Post’s executive editor. During that time, he came under brutal pressure from Trump. And yet he spoke forcefully and eloquently of a free press and the Post’s mission, demonstrating his commitment in concrete terms. He often declared that the Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”

 

2013

Jeff Bezos acquires The Washington Post. From an interview with The Independent:

  • “If we figure out a new golden era at The Post…that will be due to the ingenuity and inventiveness and experimentation of the team at the Post. I’ll be there with advice from a distance. If we solve that problem, I won’t deserve credit for it.”
  • “It’s important for the Post not just to survive, but to grow. The product of the Post is still great. The piece that’s missing is that it’s a challenged business. No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.”
  • “Don [Graham] was helpful in interviews [following the purchase] when he said, ‘Mr. Bezos is a businessman, not a magician.’ I thanked him for that afterwards. In my experience, the way invention, innovation, and change happen is [through] team effort. There’s no lone genius who figures it all out and sends down the magic formula. You study, you debate, you brainstorm, and the answers start to emerge. It takes time. Nothing happens quickly in this mode. You develop theories and hypotheses, but you don’t know if readers will respond. You do as many experiments as rapidly as possible. ‘Quickly’ in my mind would be years.“
  • “The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can’t, it’s difficult to put the right resources behind it.”
  • “I had to convince myself that I could bring something to the table. I discussed this at great length with Don. I thought I could, because I could offer runway and some skill in technology and the internet and a point of view about long-term thinking, reader focus and the willingness to experiment.“

September 4, 2013: Bezos met with The Washington Post’s newsroom. Here are some things he said to them, per the Post’s writeup.

  • “What has been happening over the last few years can’t continue to happen. All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s. The number one rule has to be: Don’t be boring.”
  • “We can’t have people swooping in to read one article…What you can’t do is go for the lowest common denominator, because then what you have is mediocrity.”
  • The Post notes Bezos “repeatedly said that the success of The Post depends on its ability to draw readers into a ‘daily ritual habit’ of reading across a collection of different topics — and paying for it. ‘People will buy a package,” Bezos said, ‘they will not pay for a story.’”
  • “There are arenas where the transformation was done by the incumbents.”
  • “I’m convinced that the reach of the tablet will give us a bigger paying audience.”
  • “How many foreign bureaus in a golden era? I don’t know. We can’t go backwards. We also can’t think small. We need to think big and lean into the future. The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past no matter how good it was, especially for an institution like The Washington Post which has such a hallowed past.”
  • “Should we stop doing investigative journalism because it’s unrewarding and other people copy it? Should we stop? No, we have to figure out how to get back to that bundle, have to find things people will pay for. It’s not that they don’t want it. They say, ‘I’m not sure I want to pay for it,’ but they do want it.”
  • “I don’t feel the need to have an opinion on every issue…I’m very happy to let the folks at the Post opine on those issues. I see no reason to change what we’re doing…feel free to cover Amazon any way you want, feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.”2
  • “I do feel that newspapers and in particular The Washington Post are important components of free societies.”

2016

January 17, 2016: Jason Rezaian, The Washington Post’s correspondent in Tehran from 2012 until 2016, is freed after 544 days in Iranian prison.

 

February 24, 2016: Jeff Bezos praises executive editor Marty Baron.

 

April 18, 2016: Bezos congratulates the Post newsroom on their Pulitzer wins.

 

May 18, 2016: Baron interviews Bezos at a live Post event.

 

2018

April 16, 2018: Bezos congratulates the Post (and the Times!) on Pulitzer Prize wins.

 

September 13, 2018: Bezos says “support of American democracy through stewardship of the Washington Post” is one of his areas of focus.

 

2019

February 3, 2019: The Washington Post runs a “democracy dies in darkness” Super Bowl ad.

 

February 7, 2019: In a post on Medium, Bezos accuses The National Enquirer’s publisher of extortion. From that post:

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.

President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.

(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)

2021

December 6, 2021: Bezos comments on the death of the Post’s longtime editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

 

2022

May 9, 2022: Pulitzer Prize congrats.3

 

 

2024

October 28, 2024: Eleven days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, The Washington Post announces it will no longer run presidential endorsements and kills a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Bezos writes about the decision on the Post’s site. In part:

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to the Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)

While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.

The Post loses more than 250,000 subscribers as a result of the decision.

December 4, 2024: Andrew Ross Sorkin interviews Bezos at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit.

 

Andrew Ross Sorkin: You know that there was blowback [about the decision to stop running endorsements]. I just want to read you — this is Marty Baron, your former editor of that paper: He said this is “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” David Remnick said, if Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements, all of them, you could argue the case one way or another, but he was effectively suggesting that, given this scenario with the timing of it —

 

Jeff Bezos: Look, if I had had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons. But in fact, we made this decision. It was the right decision. I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly, because we knew there would be blowback, and we did the right thing anyway.

 

Sorkin: Okay, so let me ask you about that. There was blowback, I think 250,000 people canceled their subscription. So did you think when you were doing this that some people were going to say that, actually it creates less trust in media? I mean, part of it was aimed at creating more trust in media. And at the same time, clearly there were other people saying, maybe there’s less trust.

 

Bezos: No, I don’t follow that logic…we knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way. As I said, you know, these things punch above their weight.

 

Sorkin: And were you worried about that at all? I mean —

 

Bezos: You can’t worry. You can’t do the wrong thing because you’re worried about bad PR, or whatever it is you want to call it. This was the right decision. We made the right decision. I’m very proud of the decision.

 

Sorkin: Let me just ask you one related question. You said in your opinion piece about all of this, “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not the ideal owner.”

 

Bezos: No, I’m a terrible owner of the Post from the point of view of appearance of conflict. There is probably not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or some Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader isn’t meeting with a government official somewhere, and so there are always going to be appearances of conflict.

I’m sure a newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper and did nothing else would be, from that point of view, a much better owner. Now, the advantage I bring to the Post is, you know, when they need financial resources, I’m available…I’m the doting parent in that regard.

 

Sorkin: I think embedded underneath the fundamental question is this. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it. The New York Times has been writing about it. It’s whether…you had any worry in your mind about your other businesses, about Trump, and whether he would ultimately target an Amazon or target a Blue Origin as retaliation against negative coverage, given that you had lived through that.

 

Bezos: No, I don’t think — that was certainly not in my mind. And I’m also very aware the Post covers all presidents very aggressively and is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively. And you know, this endorsement or non-endorsement isn’t going to change…it’s a drop in the bucket.

 

Sorkin: If [Trump ]likes you, he likes you, and if he doesn’t like you, he’s not gonna like you anyway.

 

Bezos: Well, I don’t know. I mean, that’s a different question, but if we’re talking about Trump, I think it’s very interesting. I’m actually very optimistic this time around that we’re gonna see — I’m very hopeful about his — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country…

[…]

 

Sorkin: What about the idea that [Trump] thinks the press is the enemy?

 

Bezos: I’m gonna try to talk him out of that idea. I don’t think the press is the enemy, and I don’t think — you know, he’s also — you’ve probably grown in the last few years. He has, too. It’s like, you know, this is not the case. The press is not the enemy.

 

Sorkin: I hope you’re right.

 

Bezos: I hope I’m right too! Let’s go persuade him of this! You and I should go. Let’s go talk to him. I really don’t — I think that this is absolutely — I don’t think he’s gonna see it the same way. But maybe I’ll be wrong.

 

Sorkin: Was that always your thought, by the way?

 

Bezos: What I’ve seen so far is that [Trump] is calmer than he was the first time, and more confident, more settled.

[…]

 

Sorkin: One more Washington Post question…the big plan to save or fix The Washington Post. Because you’ve been a great innovator as it comes to Amazon, everything else. Do you have a big idea about how the Post is going to change, newspapers are going to change?

 

Bezos: I have a bunch of ideas. And I’m working on that right now. I have a couple of small inventions there. So we’ll see. You know, we saved The Washington Post once. This will be the second time. I’d like to save — let’s see, 2013, so 11 years ago, it took a couple of years. It made money for six or seven years after that, last few years, it’s lost money again, and it needs to be put back on a good footing again. The first time we did it. by transitioning away from advertising to subscriptions and also away from being a local paper to being a national paper. There are many more details to it, but that was the basic formula that was used, and it was very successful. And we have a few other ideas. So stay tuned. We’ll see.

 

2025

February 26, 2025: Bezos announces changes to the Post’s opinion pages. From now on, he says, they will primarily be “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” He adds, “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

 

  1. We don’t know how many employees the Post has in total.
  2. The Washington Post laid off its Amazon reporter on Wednesday.
  3. The Post went on to win Pulitzer Prizes in 2023, 2024, and 2025, but Bezos didn’t tweet about them.
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