Publisher Fred Ryan Leaves After 9 Years At Helm Of Washington Post

Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, announced his resignation on Monday. Ryan oversaw the publication’s rapid rise throughout the Trump administration but was powerless to stop the industry’s decline in recent years.

According to the publication, Ryan, 68, will be the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation’s newly established Centre on Public Civility director. According to Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Patty Stonesifer, a former Gates Foundation executive and board member, will temporarily replace him at the Post.

Sally Buzbee, the former executive editor of the Associated Press, was appointed by Ryan, Politico’s former CEO and founder, to succeed Marty Baron as the Post’s chief editor in 2021.

Ryan was chosen to lead The Washington Post a year after Bezos purchased it in 2013, succeeding Katharine Weymouth, the legendary longtime CEO, and ending the Graham family’s eight-decade run as editors of the largest newspaper in the nation’s capital.

The Post, with the tagline “Democracy dies in darkness,” aggressively and creatively covered Donald Trump’s election and inauguration, nearly tripling its newsroom personnel and significantly expanding its online presence.

While leading such a huge organization is never simple, Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, a think tank for the news business, said that “if you step back and look at the last nine years, it has been an excellent period at The Washington Post and for the journalism it holds dear.”

Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, announced his resignation on Monday.

Brown said, “He took an exceptional brand and modernised it with vibrant and significant journalism.”

According to Tom Rosenstiel, a seasoned Washington journalist currently a professor at the University of Maryland, even if the Post benefited from a “Trump bump” like other news organizations, a news organization in Washington was also vulnerable to the issues that would arise with that outcome.

At the end of the Trump presidency, it had three million digital subscribers; however, that number has fallen to around 2.5 million. According to the Post, its digital site saw 139 million visitors in March 2020 but only 58 million in December 2022.

Did it fully make the switch to digital that the (New York) Times did? stated Rosenstiel. “You would have to respond “no” by all standards. Additionally, the previous few years have been much harder.

Late in 2018 and early in 2023, The Post underwent rounds of layoffs and suffered budget cuts that included discontinuing its Sunday magazine. The Los Angeles Times announced this week that it was laying off around 10% of its newsroom personnel, and NPR made a similar announcement earlier this year. Both the pandemic and inflation have severely damaged the journalism sector. The largest newspaper chain in the country, Gannett, has fired hundreds of journalists.

Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, announced his resignation on Monday.

When Ryan declined to answer questions about layoffs from journalists from his organization at a newsroom meeting in the latter part of last year, he infuriated several people at The Post.

Ryan claimed to the Post that the current downturn had nothing to do with his decision to leave.

He remarked, “I do not doubt that The Washington Post’s high-caliber journalism will always be successful.

Ryan has overseen the Post “through a period of innovation, journalistic excellence and growth,” Bezos wrote in a memo to the newspaper workers. His attention to the nexus of journalism and technology has been extremely beneficial to readers and has set the stage for further development.

With Bezos funding the Post, Brown said, the company and a new leader would seem to have ownership in a place devoted to maintaining quality.

Ryan is presently the chair of the board of trustees at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute and served as Reagan’s chief of staff from the time he left office until 1995.

If you think being in the news industry is difficult, Rosenstiel remarked, “the only job Fred Ryan can find that might be potentially more difficult is taking on the challenge of bringing civility to public debates.”

SOURCE – (AP)