The Washington Submit’s billionaire proprietor Jeff Bezos will meet with the paper‘s masthead and a variety of its reporters on Thursday, a Submit spokesperson stated, a uncommon in-person gathering with employees that comes after final month’s mass layoffs.
The New York Instances first reported the assembly. The spokesperson didn’t reply questions on particular timing or which journalists would attend the gathering at Bezos’ mansion in Washington D.C.,’s prosperous Kalorama neighborhood.
Bezos has stated little publicly because the Submit laid off a 3rd of the corporate final month, together with greater than 300 journalists, and pulled again from a number of reporting sections. His first public remark got here on Feb. 7 when he appointed Jeff D’Onofrio as interim CEO following Will Lewis’ departure, saying that “the Submit has a necessary journalistic mission and a rare alternative.”
Within the days main as much as the layoffs, a number of reporting desks — the White Home crew, the international crew and the metro desk — pleaded in memos to Bezos to spare their very own or their colleagues’ jobs. Many within the newsroom additionally expressed issues to him publicly on social media. The pleas went ignored.
Bezos has obtained widespread criticism from Washington Submit alums and media watchers over shedding tons of of journalists, together with its stellar worldwide crew simply forward a brand new warfare with Iran.
Former Submit government editor Marty Baron stated there was “no signal” of the “steadfast assist and confidence” Bezos gave him throughout his tenure because the paper’s chief, whereas Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein stated Bezos’ possession over the previous yr has seen him “curtail or demean” the paper’s “journalistic and democratic potentialities.”
Nonetheless, the paper’s present government editor, Matt Murray, stated throughout a convention final month that Bezos supported the Submit’s mission.
“He’s a believer in honest information,” Murray stated at Semafor’s “Restoring Belief in Media” summit. “He’s a believer in bringing data out to individuals. He’s not as eager about kind of serving simply the lead audiences, however he needs common individuals to see information, and what he needs is for us to be related and full of life in individuals’s lives.”
