Washington Submit Proprietor Jeff Bezos Provides First Assertion After Layoffs

Washington Submit proprietor Jeff Bezos gave his first public assertion because the paper enacted large job cuts this week, and it centered on “information” and understanding reader pursuits.

The billionaire Amazon founder, who constructed one of many world’s most respected corporations with a relentless deal with buyer satisfaction, indicated he wished to see that very same vitality on the Submit.

“The Submit has an important journalistic mission and a unprecedented alternative,” Bezos wrote. “Every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The info tells us what is efficacious and the place to focus.”

Bezos’ assertion got here as Submit CEO Will Lewis introduced he was stepping down, to get replaced in an interim capability by Submit CFO Jeff D’Onofrio.

In his personal assertion, D’Onofrio stated that “buyer information will drive our choices, sharpening our edge in delivering what’s most respected to our audiences.”

Bezos and D’Onofrio’s statements struck an analogous tone to feedback made by the paper’s prime editor, Matt Murray, in addressing workers earlier this week.

“Immediately is about positioning ourselves to turn out to be extra important to folks’s lives in what has turn out to be a extra crowded, aggressive, and complex media panorama,” Murray stated throughout a workers name on Wednesday. “For too lengthy, we have operated with a construction that is too rooted within the days after we had been a quasi-monopoly native newspaper.”

Following the layoffs, Murray spoke repeatedly about specializing in areas of reader curiosity and understanding viewers information in an look on the Puck podcast “The Grill Room.”

He stated that when he was introduced on, he felt the corporate hadn’t “absolutely embraced the digital web revolution the proper method.”

He added that the corporate had a “lengthy technique to go in utilizing information — information to tell what we wrote, information to tell how we publish, information to grasp our viewers, information to grasp our readers, information to grasp our prospects.”

The outspoken deal with information from Submit management has drawn some criticism.

“‘Buyer information’ is what has changed ‘focus group’ for a similar sort of parents who just about killed Sports activities Illustrated by stamping out its originality and magnetism in favor of formulaic swill,” The Atlantic’s Sally Jenkins, previously of the Submit, wrote Saturday on X.

Nonetheless, the messaging from Submit management may assist appease some critics who’ve seen administration strikes in recent times as rooted in political ideology and never information — although will probably be tough to win them over.

The Submit confronted a revolt each contained in the newsroom and amongst readers when Bezos made a late-hour name in 2024 that the paper would not endorse a presidential candidate for the primary time in 36 years. NPR reported that greater than 200,000 subscriptions had been canceled within the days following.

The paper confronted one other spherical of criticism in February 2025 when Bezos determined to reorient the Submit’s opinion part — usually thought-about the proprietor’s prerogative — round private liberties and free markets.

Former Submit government editor Martin Baron, who labored carefully with Bezos throughout his tenure atop the paper, wrote in a LinkedIn publish after the layoffs that the Submit’s challenges had been made “infinitely worse by ill-conceived choices that got here from the very prime.”

Critics of Bezos’ strikes have stated he ought to take into account financially supporting the paper, given its function in society.

“It simply appears heartbreaking that he does not really feel the paper is necessary sufficient to bankroll,” Sally Quinn, the longtime journalist and widow of former Submit government editor, Ben Bradlee, stated this week on CNN.

Bezos stated in his assertion that he felt the Submit’s management going ahead may construct an “thrilling and thriving subsequent chapter” for the paper.