Good evening, and welcome back to In The Room, my twice-weekly look inside the power corridors of the media industry. (If someone forwarded you this email, click here to cut out the middleman and get these notes directly in your inbox. You can obviously afford it and probably expense it.)

Tonight, the inside scoop on Jeff Bezos’ search for his next Washington Post C.E.O., with new intel on Patty Stonesifer’s shortlist of candidates, some discouraging revenue projections and a dishy little preview of Marty Baron’s forthcoming book.

But first… Warner Bros. Discovery launched CNN Max in beta today, and as anticipated the new streaming product will lean heavily on a live simulcast of the flagship network, including the marquee afternoon and primetime shows hosted by Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Kaitlan Collins, Abby Phillip and Laura Coates, as well as two hours of the morning show. The incentive for viewers who want their news via streaming, including yours truly, is obvious, and for that very reason it’ll be interesting to see how the cable providers react. On the other hand, as one veteran media executive noted, “If CNN airs programming in the Max forest and no one is watching, does Jake Tapper make a sound and do the MVPDs even care?”

In actuality, of course, Baron and Ryan more than disagreed from time to time, and they had plenty of audible disputes during their nearly seven-year run together. Before settling into what Baron describes in his forthcoming memoir as “a constructive, friendly, mutually supportive groove,” the two men “argued, incessantly and furiously” about “almost everything.” “Whenever Fred entered my office,” Baron writes, “my executive assistant, sitting just outside my door, knew she would soon hear me shouting.”

One of their final disputes came in Baron’s final years, when he realized that despite a pattern of record digital growth, fueled in no small part by liberal Trump agita, “the paper faced a seemingly insurmountable competitive gap” with The New York Times. In Collision of Power, which will publish next week, Baron writes with envy of the Times’ aggressive diversification into lifestyle offerings like Cooking and Games and Wirecutter that made the brand an indispensable part of readers’ lives beyond newsroom coverage, fueling the company’s growth to what is today nearly 10 million digital subscriptions. “The Post had not made big strategic bets,” Baron writes. “No active efforts were made to identify potential acquisitions… Importantly, unlike The Times, we had not insinuated ourselves into people’s daily, non-news routines.”

According to Baron’s rendition of events, he saw the early signs of what would be the Post’s slow fade from its renewed grasp of glory. “Several times over my final two years at The Post, I implored Fred to pull Bezos into a thorough, long-term strategy conversation,” Baron writes. “There was an urgent competitive threat, and we needed his counsel. And whatever we settled on doing, we needed his bank account. To my frustration, that meeting was never proposed to Bezos. In early January 2023, I asked Fred why. He didn’t give me a direct answer, only saying: ‘Whenever we have Jeff ’s time, I’ve never missed the opportunity to take it.’”

The paper’s inability to keep pace with the Times in the post-Trump years would ultimately prove fateful for Ryan, as I’ve reported on several occasions. Subscriber churn, declining ad revenue, the lack of a clear vision, and a talent exodus soon gave way to inertia and pervasive frustrations with Ryan’s leadership, particularly among members of the Post’s vocal and engaged union. In June, Bezos announced that Ryan would step down and that Patty Stonesifer, a longtime Bezos confidant and Amazon board member, would serve as interim chief executive, spearheading the search for Ryan’s permanent replacement.

To her credit, Stonesifer steadied morale overnight, and she remains widely revered throughout the newsroom. But she could not reverse the economic trendlines. After years of profitability, the Post went into the red in 2022. Now, sources familiar with the Post’s financials tell me that the paper is on track to lose roughly $100 million this year, a fate that it risks repeating annually if it does not course correct pronto. (A Post spokesperson declined to comment.)

By late summer, Stonesifer had put together an initial list of roughly a dozen candidates. Befitting the Post’s preoccupation with its rival, Stonesifer’s top candidate for the position was the woman largely responsible for the Times’ meteoric growth, its C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien, sources with knowledge of the matter said. From the beginning, however, Stonesifer believed that Kopit Levien, who happens to spend about half her time in Washington, was highly unlikely to take the position—why leave the thriving Times for the beleaguered Post? Stonesifer may have also sought out Kopit Levien’s predecessor, Mark Thompson, though by the time of her search he was already engaged in talks to become the C.E.O. of CNN.

Other candidates on Stonesifer’s initial list included (but were not limited to) more editorialish business leaders, like The Atlantic C.E.O. Nicholas Thompson and The Economist president Bob Cohn, who both began their careers as journalists. The search also included newish Politico C.E.O. Goli Sheikholeslami. All three took meetings with Stonesifer, as did Dawn Ostroff, the extremely connected former Spotify chief content officer who now serves on the boards of Activision and Paramount. Others under consideration included McClatchy C.E.O. Craig Forman and Texas Tribune co-founder and former C.E.O. Evan Smith, both of whom were contacted by Sucherman.

Interestingly, the candidate yield suggests the challenges of filling the position—providing the patina of both change and continuity, the ability to manage unprecedented high-wattage headaches, and report into one of the world’s richest men. While all are accomplished in their own right, many either hail from much smaller organizations or adjacent fields, and none—at least none so far—have the gravitas of Meredith, or maybe even Fred. Regardless, in recent weeks, Stonesifer has whittled her list down to about five finalists, sources familiar with the matter said, though it’s not entirely clear who remains.

Finally, there is the matter of staff morale, which has only just been placated. Stonesifer is wary of selecting any C.E.O who may rock the boat. And, indeed, many staff have asked why Stonesifer doesn’t just take on the position herself—an ask that Bezos made at one point, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Alas, Stonesifer appears eager to move on from the Post, in part due to the need to care for her husband, the veteran journalist Michael Kinsley, who has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for thirty years; in part because, at 67, she has earned the right to travel and spend more time with her grandchildren, free from the demands of running a struggling newspaper in the nation’s capital at a fraught time in American history.

Of course, no one will be more instrumental to the success of the Post than Bezos himself. The money is coming out of his own pocket, after all, and without so much as an advisory board to guide his investments. Indeed, as Baron notes, the C.E.O. is the only person from the Post who meets with Bezos on a one-on-one basis. Toward the end of Collision of Power, Baron notes that “when Bezos stepped down as C.E.O. of Amazon in July 2021 to become executive chair of the board, he signaled he’d be devoting more ‘time and energy’ to The Post, Blue Origin, and his charitable endeavors. Blue Origin and philanthropy got the extra attention,” Baron continues. “The Post did not, even as it badly needed it.”

“I suspect The Post is getting it now,” Baron adds. “In one-on-one meetings with key staffers, [Bezos] has been apprised of deep internal discontent.” After all, he continues, “Few news organizations in American history have played as important a role as The Post in holding power to account. The country needs a healthy, growing, and confident Washington Post. I feel sure it will have one.”