On Thursday, Jeff Bezos opened the doors of his stately Kalorama mansion to more than 30 Washington Post executives, editorial leaders, and journalists for a four-hour summit on the state of the paper—a rare chance to access not just the owner himself, but financial data and editorial strategy not typically divulged to the scribblers on the newsroom floor. Given the Post’s recent seismic misfortunes and indignities, and Bezos’s limited bandwidth, the meeting was near universally interpreted by the journalists present and their colleagues back on K Street as a bellwether for the paper’s future.

In the Bezos tradition, the day began with the silent reading of a six-page memo from interim C.E.O. Jeff D’Onofrio, which outlined the Post’s financial story dating back 20 years. In the Bezos universe, the famed “six-page” memo format often includes appendices with charts and footnotes that can significantly extend their length; D’Onofrio’s ran to 23 pages and provided what one source described as a “full, under-the-hood look at the paper’s business and finances.” Attendees made notes in the margins and then, as another source put it, “We all sat around in oversize chairs and couches—including Jeff B.—and had our discussions.”

Later, in the afternoon, executive editor Matt Murray would share his own memo outlining the Post’s new embrace of a data-driven editorial culture, which included detailed reader engagement metrics: what people are reading, what they’re not, and what he and his team are doing about that. Among other things, this session gave Matt the chance to justify his controversial decision to shutter entire sections at the paper despite the fierce emotional blowback. To wit: Post Sports may have a storied legacy, and at least a dozen Athletic- or ESPN-caliber journalists, but—at the risk of invoking he who shall not be named—truly, people were not reading their stuff.

Most notably, the sessions were punctuated by a lunch—a choice of steak or halibut, served on china emblazoned with the Washington Post logo—during which Bezos stood for the entire hour-and-a-half duration and invited Posties to ask him anything. The most obvious and pressing question came from Hannah Natanson, the enterprise reporter whose phone and laptop were recently seized by the FBI: Why do you still want to own the Post?

Here, Bezos acknowledged that he was an imperfect owner given his “many outside interests.” (“You could do worse,” he quipped.) Many friends and family members had encouraged him to sell, he said, and he’d received offers from at least seven prospective buyers. But, describing himself as both principled and stubborn, he said he still believed that the Post was an important institution that needed to be saved.

Bezos also accepted some responsibility for the decline that began under former publisher and C.E.O. Fred Ryan in the wake of the first Trump administration. Senior leadership had been “asleep,” he said, and he had not been involved enough to recognize the mistakes. Specifically, he noted that Ryan continued to add staff even as the financial situation became increasingly dire, when he should have implemented a hiring freeze while assessing the problem. But he refuted the idea that the Post owed its earlier success to Trump alone. The “Trump bump” explanation was “too passive,” Bezos said. “The world is always interesting; it’s up to us to go find the stories.”

In regard to the recent layoffs, Bezos said he hadn’t dictated the targets of the cuts, but simply asked Matt to “follow the data.” He reiterated here that the Post would always be responsive to the data: If a coverage area or newsroom initiative wasn’t working, why continue it? Though he made an exception for investigative journalism, which he described as a cornerstone of the Post that should be maintained regardless of performance. When asked to address the ouster of Will Lewis, he said he did not want to comment on personnel.

No organization is a monolith, and Post employees’ reactions to the meeting were mixed. Most folks I spoke to commended Bezos for taking so much uninterrupted time to field their questions and praised Post leadership for giving such a detailed account of how they were trying to monetize the journalism. Others saw it as a symbolic gesture that was unlikely to change the Post’s fortunes. A not insignificant number of Post staff continue to see Bezos’s recent moves through the prism of his diplomacy toward Trump. Fielding those questions, Bezos said that Trump had “warmed” to him in the second term, but noted he’d had relationships with presidents dating back to Clinton. As Status noted this week, he was also pressed on Amazon’s $75 million investment in the Melania documentary. Bezos said he had no part in the matter and did not discuss it with Trump, but suggested the film would eventually turn a profit.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the meeting, however, was how short it was on details about what’s to come. At one point, D’Onofrio said he was working on the turnaround portion of the strategy and told employees to “stay tuned.” But those who remain at the Post after years of successive layoffs, buyouts, and defections have been staying tuned for half a decade now. Historically, Bezos’s very rare visits with Post leadership have steadied their nerves—his calm authority and the Kalaroma trappings can be a powerful salve—but only for so long. Ultimately, the failures of his successive publishers to save the paper are a reflection on his own aforementioned imperfections as a media proprietor.

While Bezos was fielding questions in Washington, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger revealed that the paper had more than doubled the size of its newsroom, to 2,300 journalists—and more than 3,000 if you include Opinion columnists, Athletic staff, and other newsroom-adjacent operations. The Post now has fewer than 500 journalists. As I’ve noted on many occasions, they’re not really comparable businesses. After all, the Times generates more in quarterly profits than the Post does in topline annual revenue. And the Post is never going to be the Times, even if Bezos once harbored that vision. Today, he imagines something smaller, nimbler, more focused, befitting the industry’s broader trajectory. But what does that mean for a legacy media brand like the Post playing in a heavily saturated political market—and how is it going to get there? What, exactly, is Bezos trying to save?

Indeed, some of this will emerge in D’Onofrio’s strategy document, perhaps his answer to the biblical Innovation Report. But the first decision Bezos has to make, of course, is whether to keep D’Onofrio around to execute his own plan.