It’s been a tumultuous year at the Washington Post. A few weeks ago, in a staff memo about the future of the paper’s editorial page, Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declared that he is proudly “of America and for America," and that future opinion columns should reflect the values of "personal liberties and free markets."
Shortly afterward, longtime Post editorial columnist Ruth Marcus quit the paper, claiming one of her columns had been spiked because it was critical of Bezos’ memo. All of this came in the wake of the paper’s announcement that it would be making major changes to the newsroom, with the goal of prioritizing “growing digital products.” As one member of the paper’s leadership put it: “Text will no longer be a default format.”
In the midst of all this, the Post has also brought on a new managing editor, who just so happens to be an Arizonan. Peter Spiegel joins the Post after a long career as a political reporter, foreign correspondent and bureau chief at places like Forbes, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Spiegel joined The Show to talk about his journalistic origin story, which began right here in Phoenix.
Full conversation
PETER SPIEGEL: I was in Scottsdale public schools, and I remember very distinctly, like, maybe like every other journalist, there was just one teacher in sixth grade at Hopi elementary, Miss Pitts, and she did this thing where she had us make her make her own newspapers.
It was, gosh, I even remember the lead story was about Jimmy Carter. … That's how far back it was. We literally were cutting. We drew, you know, with crayons, pictures, and we wrote them out in longhand, and we cut and pasted them onto newspapers. And I just thought it was the coolest thing that I could, as a kid, or even as a, just someone living in Phoenix, write about events that were global and international, and that just got me hooked. And frankly, Miss Pitts, if you're listening, thank you very much. You've got me hooked, hooked into journalism.
DINGMAN: Yeah, shout out to Miss Pitts. I love it. Um, what do you think it was about the experience? Was it the fact that you could make your own kind of media product that contained information? Do you remember having any tangible feeling about that?
SPIEGEL: We were kind of a family that at home over dinner, my parents would talk about current events. My dad was a big Barry Goldwater supporter. Goldwater was actually, at the time, still in the Senate. Barry Goldwater's grandson was actually on my brother's soccer team, and so we would see him occasionally at soccer practices, in the soccer games and stuff like that.
And, you know, not that Phoenix back then was in any way a backwater, but sure, it was still a relatively small town. And for you know, I still remember as a kid, if I wanted to listen to a baseball game, I would get Vin Scully, and they would get the Dodgers, because there was no hometown team at the time, right? It felt a little bit like this is a window into a larger world that I didn't otherwise have.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and if I'm hearing you right, Peter, if I may, there's also a little hint in there of Goldwater, not just being a name that has a political resonance to it, but also being a guy at a soccer practice? Like, there was a little bit of a humanization element to your content?
SPIEGEL: I guess that, you know, the two things are connected, right? Like, you know, growing up in Phoenix, sometimes you felt very disconnected from global events, but you had it at the dinner table, and then you were introduced to a guy that I later learned was a, you know, a national figure who ran for president. Oh, hey, there's this grandkid. I mean, it was, it was making what was global very, very real to me.
DINGMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, if I may actually want to jump quite a bit ahead in your story now, because I know, if I'm not mistaken, you worked overseas for a time, right, when you were at the Financial Times in Brussels and London?
SPIEGEL: Yeah, for about 10 years. So, you know, again, part of that spark was, I've always been interested in international affairs, and I had, you know, a couple of tours of duty in London because I worked for the Financial Times, which is a London-based news organization. But then was Brussels bureau chief for about six years. And it really was, in many ways, a dream come true.
DINGMAN: I mean, that's really lovely. I am, admittedly, though, also kind of curious about this from a, from a wonkier standpoint, which is that, if I'm not mistaken, the years that you were abroad is roughly speaking like 2010 to 2019, and that is a period of time when there were just all of these seismic transformations in how news was delivered and consumed, not to mention pretty seismic times in American politics. And so when you came back, I'm wondering what you made of both the media landscape and the and then the news landscape here. Did it, did it feel like a giant shift?
SPIEGEL: Yeah, it really did. I mean to be perfectly blunt, a figure like Donald Trump, if he would tell me that he would be elected president even a couple years before I left, I would have said, no, no, that kind of populist, nationalist, kind of sentiment. We saw that with Pat Buchanan running against, you know, in the public primary against George H.W. Bush, it always gets 20%, 25% the Republican vote. It never achieves national prominence.
And boom, I come home and, and Donald Trump as president. But as you said, also the media landscape, you know, here in Washington, I had left, and you had even medium-sized papers, like the Baltimore Sun, even the Arizona Republic had small to medium sized Washington bureaus, and they were all gone. And in its place, where things that were digital only, Politico had obviously started, and it was ramping up Axios and trying to figure out how legacy media, for lack of better word, fit in. That is much more what I do now in this new job at the post.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, I'm glad you brought up the Post and the idea of legacy papers, because in writing about you coming on board, the executive editor at the paper, Matt Murray, specifically cited how he is going to be looking to you to help shape the “ next chapter of the Post.” What can you tell us about what that means to you?
SPIEGEL: Well, so much like the Post, the Financial Times had, for you know, 150 years as a print newspaper, the system by which we produced the news was very much. Reporters come in the morning. They work on the stories. They file in the afternoon, we put in the newspaper in the evening, and then they go home.
The problem with that is the digital audience. Readers do not show up in the evening. They show up in the morning. The Post still makes a decent amount of money off its print edition, but the numbers keep moving over to close to 3 million subscribers to the Post. The percentage of them that are the print edition is almost de minimis and trying to regularize our operations, so we're focused on that morning reader to own the morning on the politics story. How do we draw people to the site to read it, through news alerts, through even tick tock and and some of the social media? The Post has been a little bit behind on sure, some of that stuff.
DINGMAN: But do you view things like TikTok or Instagram or newsletters or podcasts, whatever the case may be? Do you view those things as distinct editorial products, or is the idea that those things will point readers/viewers, I guess, back to the core print version of the paper?
SPIEGEL: I think it's got to be both. I think it's got to be both. I mean, the mantra, which I always say, which is, frankly, not original, not even mine, is we have to meet the readers where they are.
DINGMAN: Well, speaking of readers, there's also been this ongoing controversy about the opinion pages at the post, and after the letter was published from Jeff Bezos about his different vision for how he wants the opinions to be expressed, tens of thousands of digital subscribers canceled their subscriptions to the paper. What do you think about that? And more than that, I'm wondering, what in your mind is the role of a healthy opinion section?
SPIEGEL: Yeah, know, it's a good question. I'm not sure I have a brilliant answer to it. And I guess what I keep saying is, go to washingtonpost.com and look at our journalism, not our opinion journalism, but our reporting. We are not pulling our punches, and as a matter of fact, we have, have had a really good run of scoops and exclusives on this administration, and that's just, you know, the best way to counter that argument that somehow we are, you know, a newfangled, right kind of news organization.
DINGMAN: Well, can I ask you, I mean, we have heard about things like at the LA Times, for example, where the owner of that paper has talked about putting a fairness meter on the regular journalism, not the opinion pages. Have you gotten any indication that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what happens outside of the opinion pages?
SPIEGEL: There is no evidence that I have seen that Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in that kind of stuff. Let me give you a different example, because I used to work with the Wall Street Journal for a time, and Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal. And Rupert Murdoch is not a shy and retiring person when it comes to his views on politics. And the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is not shy, retiring about their views. They've always been very right wing opinion pages.
But if you know the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, they do amazing journalism. They were the ones who broke Stormy Daniels. So I guess my argument would be, there are numerous examples of news organizations where the opinion pages, which are run by the publisher and the owner, are firewalled from the news pages, and the news pages do amazing work without fear or favor. And I think you know, the LA Times being an LA Times veteran is maybe one of those sad stories where we see what happens when the owner sticks his nose into the news because people stop wanting to read it.
