Fred Ryan moves on from Washington Post after nine years as publisher

Fred Ryan, the publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post for most of its decade of rapid growth under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will leave the company in August, he announced on June 12, 2023.

Ryan, will lead the newly formed nonpartisan Center on Public Civility at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

As per the Post, his departure comes at a time when economic head winds have buffeted the entire media industry — including The Post, which slowed its recent expansion with a rare round of layoffs earlier this year — after tension among top executives and the exits of several top Post leaders and journalists for jobs with competitors. Ryan’s relationship with newsroom staffers further soured following a town hall last year where he declined questions from guild members about the company’s future.

Patty Stonesifer, the founding chief executive of the Gates Foundation and a former high-ranking Microsoft executive, was named the interim CEO of The Post on June 12, 2023, starting immediately, and is leading the search for Ryan’s replacement.

In an interview, Ryan said he had a long-standing passion for the issues that inspired the center’s mission. “The decline in civility is threatening the foundation of our democracy,” he added. A former Reagan administration official, Ryan called it “a bookend for something I did early on in my career.”

In his own note to his staff, Ryan wrote that “together, we have accomplished one of the most extraordinary transformations in modern media history,” as The Post “evolved from a primarily local print newspaper to become a global digital publication.”