Honest News — Everywhere

Fred Ryan

10.15.20

Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan has a clear, but broad vision for the organization: become a world-read source for honest and unbiased news and information, on any device, any platform, any place you are. Hear his thoughts on what it takes to be a leading news organization in the 21st century.

Summary:

Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan has a clear, but broad vision for the organization: become a world-read source for honest and unbiased news and information, on any device, any platform, any place you are. Hear his thoughts on what it takes to be a leading news organization in the 21st century.

Thuy

As publisher, what is your vision for The Washington Post?
Fred_Ryan

Fred Ryan

My vision and our shared vision at The Washington Post is to become a a world-read source for honest and unbiased news and information, on any device, in any platform, any place you are. And on devices yet to be invented. That's our model. We want to follow that. We want to be ready for the next device, but we want to, if you're on Facebook, we want you to be able to see it on Facebook, if you're on Apple news, we want you to see it there. If you're on your iPhone or if you're on your Apple Watch, whatever you're on, we want to make The Washington Post easily accessible for you. And if you want to read it in print, we'll do that, too.

Thuy

You want to be everywhere. And how do you keep your team inspired and motivated to stay focused on that vision?
Fred_Ryan

Fred Ryan

Well, there's a there's a kind of a term you hear in the news business that we are "platform agnostic", meaning we prepare the news and we don't care where it goes. Our mission is the reverse. We are platform specific. We have people whose job with The Washington Post is to take and post content and make it work as best as it can on Snapchat. That is their goal, on Snapchat. We have another team to take Washington Post content and make it work as well as it can on Apple News. We have another team that works in Facebook and instant articles and taking the content whenever the content, the ethical rules stand, the quality of the journalism, the sourcing, the reporting, but making it work in the formats that people enjoy it. We're on Tik Tok now, we're on multiple platforms because we want to be able to serve the information where the reader is.

Thuy

It shows you understand your audience.
Fred_Ryan

Fred Ryan

We spend a lot of time trying to do that.