Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, mi bi-weekly private email on the inner workings of the media industry. Tonight, we turn our attention to the recent drama at The Washington Post, where a series of internecine tweets and retweets from some of the paper’s most recognizable employees are testing Sally Buzbee and Fred Ryan’s ability to manage the newsroom.

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Meanwhile, like many newsrooms, the Post was also dealing with a particularly novel digital age phenomenon—the trend of increasingly factitious, and sometimes influential, reporters airing their grievances on social media, which could occasionally complexify the overlap between the Post’s institutional brand and their own personal reputations and voice. It was a trend that visibly troubled Baron, as well as Fred Ryan, the organization’s publisher and C.E.O. The new executive editor would have to face the dual challenges of keeping the paper competitive with the Times and CNN while also managing the frustrations of its most outspoken staff, many of whom had loyal and ardent individual followings, particularly on Twitter.

During the interviews, Bezos listened intently while Ryan grilled the finalists—the AP’s Sally Buzbee, CNN’s Meredith Artley, and Post editors Steven Ginsberg and Cameron Barr—to ascertain how they might lead the paper, maintain its storied reputation, and continue to grow its business, sources with knowledge of the interviews told me. One of Ryan’s primary lines of inquiry focused on how each candidate intended to manage the staff’s use of social media and prevent employees from using Twitter in ways that could damage the company’s credibility. Ryan described such behavior as undermining the newsroom in a manner that not only hurt the brand but also diminished morale. “He wanted to know: how do we rein this in?” one person familiar with the interviews told me. He also asked candidates to explain whether they would have published Tom Cotton’s infamous New York Times op-ed advocating for a military response in the wake of the George Floyd protests—and how they would have handled the public pushback from their own employees...