Jim VandeHei

We're going to try to lock them in.

And we're going to use that and then offer the things that people in that category care about, food, health, buying gadgets.

And we're going to focus solely on subscriptions.

A genius...

Whether you like the New York Times or not, a beautifully, meticulously run strategy and company.

Knew exactly what it is, knows exactly what it is, and did it.

The Post could have done a version of that.

And instead, they've now, for the better part of a decade, done everything you shouldn't do if you want to build a great media company.

in this era.

I think it's both, right?

I think that in retrospect, if you look across the media, everybody benefited tremendously from Trump being a celebrity and this sort of outsider and somebody that people were just captivated by through love or hate.

Everyone benefited from that.

At the same time, Marty Baron was the real deal.

Like they were doing real investigative work and people were responding to that.

And they were smart enough to exploit that for subscription sales.

So that probably that was the high watermark of kind of the modern last 20 years Washington Post.

The problem is that – and now it's like somebody who started companies but runs them.

You got to live paranoid.

You got to always make sure you're not responding to a false indicator, either positive or negative.

And there was a sense that, oh, my God, like we can just keep growing like this forever because we're the Washington Post as opposed to – wait, take a deep breath –