Jeff Bezos’ Plan to Revamp Washington Post Opinion Section Leads Editor to Quit

variety.com:

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Jeff Bezos is shaking up the Washington Post again. The billionaire owner of the newspaper said he will change the focus of the opinion section to focus on “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” According to Bezos, he offered editorial opinion page editor David Shipley “the opportunity to lead this new chapter.

I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,'” Bezos wrote in a post on X. ”After careful consideration, David decided to step away.” As such, “We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.” Bezos, who acquired the Washington Post in 2013, said the Post’s opinion section will “cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” According to the Amazon founder, “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views.

Today, the internet does that job.” Shipley, former editorial page editor for the New York Times and one-time executive editor of Bloomberg View became the Washington Post’s editorial page editor in July 2022.

Shipley, in an email to colleagues obtained by the New York Times, wrote in part, “It is with both sadness and gratitude that I write to let you know that I have decided to leave The Post.