Marty Baron

It was under the Graham family, as it had been for 80 years.

And then it was announced that summer, about seven months after my arrival, that Bezos would acquire it.

And then the deal closed at the beginning of October in 2013.

Yeah.

Well, I don't think I was defensive per se, but I think what I was trying to do is tell what really happened at the Post.

And what really happened is that he wanted us to set a more ambitious course for the Post.

He wanted us to be national and international.

He asked us to be fully digital as much as we could be, to be creative about that.

We proposed a lot of initiatives, funded them.

Pretty much all of them succeeded.

We then had six straight years of profitability, something like that.

He kept investing.

He didn't take the dividends.

He put them in back into investing.

We expanded.

The staff grew from about 540 when he arrived to we were headed to about 1,000 when I retired in February 2021.

And he stood up for us.

I mean, during Trump's campaign in 2015, when he himself, when the Post came under attack and then he himself came under the attack, he said quite clearly and forcefully that that was no way for someone who aspired to be president to behave.

He talked about the role of an independent press.

And he stood by that.