Democracy Dies in Darkness

In 2017, The Washington Post added the line, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to its masthead. What does this line mean to you? And why do you think it's so important to add that line so prominently on the paper?

Well, what started the process that led to that line was The Washington Post had never had a national campaign and never had a national slogan or statement. Its audience had grown, but its message had always been local. So we started a campaign, a process, I should say, internally, where we thought about how do we want to present ourselves. And we had a number of different alternatives where actually we had a list of about 600 choices. But the irony is we started with "Democracy Dies in Darkness" and we said that's really good, but let's see if there's a more positive way to say it. And we went through every incarnation you could imagine, "Freedom Lives in Light." All these things, always saying the positive instead of the negative. But then we said, but wait a minute. That is the message, that without shining light on government and our process and our decision makers and our elected officials, democracy can die. So we just went with it. And it was actually, we first put it on Snapchat. We just said, let's just put it on there, the top of our masthead and see what happens. We put it on and people thought, well that's cool.

Why did you choose Snapchat?

We had just launched, built out a Snapchat team and we thought, let's just give it a try there. And then we started putting it on the web site and on the newspaper, we never announced, there was never an announcement that here is our slogan, we're announcing it today. We just put it on and it seemed to fit. And it's kind of evolved to be something that people associate with The Washington Post. I think The Post is always viewed... Every publication has its own kind of its unique identity. And The Washington Post has always been viewed as hard-hitting, accountability, investigative, scrappy type of journalism. And we thought that that described it well.

You brought your startup experience to it, I see. Because that's sort of like a form of beta testing, right? You just threw it out there on Snapchat to see how it would do, you never announced it.

Right. We just figured, let's give it a try. And it worked. And pretty soon there were T-shirts showing up saying "Democracy Dies in Darkness." People were mailing in to us. And I said to our team, well, why don't we have our own T-shirts? So we made a T-shirt for every person at The Washington Post that says "Democracy Dies in Darkness."