Stormy Waters

What would you say is the toughest moment that you have had as a leader?

I would say two different types of difficult times in organizations that I've led. One is when, as you mentioned, the case of Jamal Khashoggi or other cases we've had where a journalist has been killed or detained or harmed or is at risk. And one thing we do is say, I say to every one of our foreign correspondents, I meet every one when they come in before they leave on their assignment and tell them, you need to know that if you are taken and you are held, we will be unrelenting until you are out. We will not stop until you're released. And if you are harmed, we will be unrelenting until the people who harm you are held to account. And no matter what they say, because we had one of our journalists, Jason Rezaian, was held in Iranian prison for 544 days, and they told him, "They've given up on you. The Washington Post does not even care about you anymore. They don't even know who you are." And we were able to sneak in little signals through his mother and his girl, his wife, who were visiting him to reinforce that we were thinking about him, he was top of mind, and we weren't gonna rest until we got him out. So that's one challenge is when somebody, it doesn't matter if you're in the media business or another business, if you are responsible for a team, you're responsible for their well-being and making sure that harm does not come to them.

The other challenge, I think people in business face, totally different one, but also one that is difficult is when we face economic downturns, and when the models have to change. And anyone who's run a business for any prolonged period of time has seen the markets go up and markets go down, sectors change. And you have to be nimble. You have to be willing to depart from the established model and say, we've got to do things different. Although this model worked for us for a while, it's gonna be hard to change the model, but we have to change it if we want to be successful going forward.

And that's what you're doing at The Washington Post. Making it very technology centric, much more so than it has been in the past.

Yes, we are very much assuming that our future, our success will depend on the world class journalism supported by phenomenal technology.