Jeff Bezos said in a CNBC interview on Wednesday that the Washington Post needed to turn a profit to indicate “a measure of its relevance,” his first remarks to a reporter since the paper laid off a third of its staff earlier this year.
After “Squawk Box” host Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed Bezos on the layoffs, which saw more than 300 journalists leave the Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom and the wind down of several reporting desks, the Amazon founder said the paper had to be “a profitable enterprise” that readers were eager to shell out money for.
“If people won’t pay for our product, it’s not a good enough product,” Bezos said. “Doing it would be like poetry without rhyming, it’s too easy. So we want — it’s got to be something that people will pay for, because that’s a signal. It’s a signal that we’re providing a relevant service.”
The billionaire said he urged Post leadership, including executive editor Matt Murray, to “follow the data” on which sections to reel back.
“There’s one exception to this: ‘Don’t follow the data on investigative reporting,’” Bezos said on Wednesday. “The heart of the post is investigative reporting, and guess what? Our newsroom today, even after the layoffs, is still larger than when we did Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.”
He noted in 2013, upon his purchase of the Post, that he would provide “financial runway” for the paper, as he didn’t want to see it be “profitable and shrinking.” Such a plan was “a survival strategy” that “ultimately leads to irrelevance at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
But on Wednesday, he said the Post, which reportedly has lost more than $100 million, would be “a more important institution because of this financial discipline.”
“It needs to be relevant to readers,” he told CNBC. “It needs to stand on its own two feet. I don’t want it to be a charity. It doesn’t need to be, and it shouldn’t be.”
