WaPo editor: Amazon’s Bezos is ‘investing in us’

Martin Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, said his contacts with the paper’s new owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are “pretty constant, but it is not as if he is running the business day to day.”

“He’s been good, he’s investing in us,” said Baron, speaking on a panel on the future of media sponsored by the I Want Media website, as part of Internet Week in New York.

“He’s talked about giving us runway to try new things, and he’s giving us runway,” Baron said of Bezos.

Baron said the company is adding to its staff of 650 journalists, with most of the additions in the digital realm.

The editor and the billionaire owner speak on the phone only “every one or two weeks” and Bezos gets fuller updates via in-person meetings — usually in Washington, DC, or Seattle — “once every two or three months.”

But Baron was quick to duck a question on what might have motivated Bezos to buy the paper from the Graham family in the first place.

Baron acknowledged that traditional print “will be a much smaller part of the media ecosystem” in the future — and that mobile will play an increasingly larger role.