Welcome back to In the Room.

I’ve just returned to Los Angeles from Washington, where I attended the first edition of The Powers That Be: Live, Puck’s new off-the-record event series featuring conversations with some of the most powerful and influential people in our cinematic universe. My partner Peter Hamby kicked things off with an enthralling conversation with former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain atop the Hay Adams, just across the street from the White House. Our next event, in L.A. in November, will feature Matt Belloni in conversation with Netflix’s Bela Bajaria.

In today’s email, fresh reporting on the final days of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post C.E.O. search, and the two finalists—Josh Steiner and Will Lewis—who are vying for the role.

But first, some scoops on the comms front…

• Kris Coratti Kelly, the veteran Washington Post P.R. chief who made the ill-fated decision to join CNN as Chris Licht’s head of communications, has found a new job in the employ of Heather Podesta, the well-known D.C. lobbyist. I’m told Coratti Kelly will head up a new New York office for Invariant, the government relations and public affairs firm Podesta founded in 2007.

• Disney is actively looking for a new ABC News communications chief amid frustrations with Van Scott, who currently serves as the P.R. lead for ABC News President Kim Godwin. Since returning to ABC News from Vice Media two years ago, Scott has lost at least eight members of his P.R. team, sources tell me. And Disney H.R. is now looking into accusations from an outgoing temp employee who accused Scott of sexism, intimidation, and withholding the opportunities, resources and information she needed to do her job. (A Disney representative declined to comment.)

Now, on to Kalorama…

The Washington Post was quite well represented that evening, in fact: Patty Stonesifer—the extremely well-liked interim publisher and C.E.O., and the architect of the post-Fred Ryan fiscal restabilization effort—was in attendance with her leadership team. There were also a few Post reporters honored by the IWMF in years past. They joined a group of D.C. media denizens—Andrea Mitchell, Norah O’Donnell, etcetera—and society types who were surely honored to walk the halls of the old Textile Museum, and adhered to the signs requesting that no photographs be taken.

The invitations to Post leadership were no small olive branch. Per sources familiar, Bezos also invited Stonesifer and her direct reports to stay after the event for another round of drinks and a more intimate conversation with their owner—a rare privilege given that Bezos’s is often engrossed with his multinational e-commerce and cloud computing empire, climate change initiatives, space avocation, and the pastimes befitting a guy worth about $150 billion, and thus rarely visits with the Post leadership team more than two or three times a year. And Bezos followed up with a day-long visit to Post headquarters on Wednesday, during which he met with business and editorial leaders, as well.

Presumably, in light of all the paper’s recent struggles—$100 million in annual revenue losses, a 15 percent decline in subscribers since 2021, late Ryan-era ennui, and the unquantifiable malaise that results from living in the shadow of the Times—the installment of a new chief executive can’t come soon enough. Steiner and Lewis are both very well accomplished but markedly distinct candidates. Steiner is a veteran of Wall Street and Washington who presumably has the financial acuity and blue chip Rolodex to manage the paper toward a more profitable future (Steiner was named to the Bloomberg L.P. board just this week). Lewis is a longtime journalist-turned-media executive with a track record for growing digital news businesses, as he did most recently at the Journal (he’s also on the board of the AP). And yet both share the apparently all-important qualification of having served at the behest of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

This last distinction comes with certain occupational hazards that, fairly or not, might initially make either candidate suspect in the eyes of the Post’s mostly liberal and occasionally activist staff. “Murdoch lieutenant” is not a title likely to engender Lewis a lot of goodwill in the Post newsroom given all the Fox empire has wrought—even if Dow Jones, the financial news conglomerate, is the least political of the Murdoch assets. As for Steiner, in a previous iteration, circa 2018, he was tasked with cultivating Bloomberg’s relationship with the Saudi Kingdom, which explains why he’s the third man pictured in the photographs of Bloomberg and Mohammed bin Salman yukking it up at a New York City Starbucks. It was a different time, to be sure—months before the brutal assassination of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, when seemingly every American business titan was willing to kiss the Saudi ring. Nevertheless, it is likely to raise eyebrows in a newsroom that never forgave nor forgot M.B.S.’s actions. (Bezos, of course, has his own storied beef with M.B.S.). Alas.

And, in a best-case scenario, perhaps it’d be nice if this new C.E.O. could identify a new editorial leadership that could undo the paper’s AP-ification under Sally Buzbee and imbue it with some of that Marty Baron-era magic. There is no indication—as of yet—that Bezos wants to grow this paper into a robust multi-platform news and lifestyle juggernaut that can rival the Times, or whatever Mark Thompson hopes to make of CNN Digital (which intends to build its own subscription business, as well.)

In some ways, Bezos seems like an accidental media baron, and the Post his prestigious hobby. He may enjoy owning the paper at an abstract level—and fashioning slogans like “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—but it’s certainly not an all-consuming interest that defines his public persona, as it does for the Sulzbergers and did for the Grahams. More importantly, he doesn’t seem to have any sort of grand plan for global domination as he did with Amazon or AWS. Indeed, his ambitions for the paper no longer seem quite as great as they did in those early years, when he introduced Amazon-style metrics for content and user engagement and professed that the Post might usurp the Times as the new paper of record. The goal for now seems to be profitability, not greatness.

Perhaps that reflects Bezos’s patience, and his willingness to play for the long term (this is the guy who is building a 10,000-year clock, after all). Alternatively, he may have simply come to terms with the obvious realization that, in the grand scheme of his empire, the media asset is never going to be anywhere close to his most important or influential business. And, truthfully, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.