In Der Spiegel, shortly before his retirement.
On mistakes in journalism:
We [journalists] make mistakes all the time, regardless of who’s in office. We are a highly imperfect profession, like every profession.
[…]
We have to recognize that we have certain flaws. We’re making decisions in real time, we’re moving quickly, we don’t have time to sit back and think about a lot of the implications of what we do. We should do more of that. But things move at a very fast pace.
On Jeff Bezos as a “patron”:
We’re not a charity. Bezos has made clear from the very beginning that we [Washington Post] would operate like a business. We’ve been profitable for years now. We got another profitable year last year despite everything. So, that’s how we function. And that’s a good thing because it’s really important that we have a sustainable business model – if we were operated like a charity and some day he [Bezos] was tired of operating this charity, we would be in a precarious place. I don’t think that the future of journalism depends on so-called “patrons”.
[…]
It does depend on good owners who have a long-term view and will invest strategically. You have to come up with the right strategic model, like Jeff Bezos did for the Post. He changed our strategy from being a regional publication to being a national and even international one. That was a very smart move.