What Bezos Brings

I'd like to ask you now about The Washington Post, because we all know that Amazon's owner, Jeff Bezos, bought it and in 2014 he tapped you to become the new publisher. What did Jeff Bezos tell you about his vision for The Washington Post?

Well, I asked him. In the very first meeting we had when we were talking about this job, I just asked him, "Jeff, why did you buy The Washington Post?" And he said, "I bought The Washington Post because I believe that a free, independent and strong press is essential for the health of our democracy." And I thought, that's the right answer, the answer I was hoping for. And I will say in the five years that I've been there since he's owned it, he has lived that every single day supporting free, independent, strong media in support of democracy.

Does he have a hand in the editorial decision or what appears on the pages of The Washington Post?

No, he has never intervened on any editorial, any story, any reporting. Where he has been enormously helpful, though, is in recruiting talented technology leaders. If you are working at one of the top technology platforms at Apple or Facebook or Google, you probably are not going to have interaction with Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai, because they're such big companies. When these engineers come to Washington Post every two weeks, we have them on the phone with Jeff Bezos and they're top technology leaders of our time talking about products, new software. We want to build new tools that our readers might enjoy. And as a result, we've been able to recruit these 400 engineers who are helping us with the success we're achieving.

That's incredible. They have that level of interaction with Jeff Bezos every two weeks?

Every two weeks. We get on the phone and he will or if he's there in person, we do it in person and go through things like what is the flow for a subscriber? What can we do to make the subscription process easier? What can we do to create tools and ways that that are our subscribers and our readers will enjoy The Washington Post on other platforms. And it's been enormous in helping us to recruit those engineers and to retain them.