Nine Post executives and Bezos met in a private room at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to finally get over the finish line. ![]() We’ll do our part,” “The news democracy needs,” “Toward a more perfect union” (rejected lest it summon thoughts of our own workforce union).īy September 2016, an impatient Bezos was forcing the issue. The ideas totaled at least 1,000: “A bias for truth,” “Know,” “A right to know,” “You have a right to know,” “Unstoppable journalism,” “The power is yours,” “Power read,” “Relentless pursuit of the truth,” “The facts matter,” “It’s about America,” “Spotlight on democracy,” “Democracy matters,” “A light on the nation,” “Democracy lives in light,” “Democracy takes work. (“Typical,” Bezos said.) Desperation led to a long list of options, venturing into the inane. Outside branding consultants were retained, to no avail. “We don’t have to be afraid of the democracy word,” he said it’s “the thing that makes the Post unique.” “I just think we’re going to have to use gut and intuition.” And he insisted that the chosen words recognize our “historic mission,” not a new one. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.” Bezos, so fixated on metrics in other contexts, now advised ditching them. “On this topic,” he told us, “I’d like to see all the sausage-making. No small order, coming up with the right phrase. “Not a paper I want to subscribe to,” as Bezos put it, but rather “an idea I want to belong to.” The idea: We love this country, so we hold it accountable. In early 2015, he had expressed his wish for a phrase that might encapsulate the newspaper’s purpose: a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product fit nicely on a T-shirt make a claim uniquely ours, given our heritage and our base in the nation’s capital and be both aspirational and disruptive. That it emerged when it did is testimony to the tortuous, and torturous, process of coming up with something sufficiently memorable and meaningful that Bezos would bless.īezos, the founder and now executive chair of Amazon, had bought The Washington Post in 2013. Producing a mission statement had been in the works for two years before Trump took office. As the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” And it was not about Trump, although his allies took it to be. Two years earlier-a month into Trump’s presidency-the Post had affixed “Democracy dies in darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, as well as at the top of its website and on everything it produced. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.” “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. Knowing keeps us free.”Įven that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. “There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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