Inside The Washington Post's product strategy

Today’s conversation: The Washington Post CTO Vineet Khosla discusses how the news experience will need to change.

Last night, we held a PvA x Human Ventures holiday party at Casa Komos. Big thanks to everyone who turned out. Among those in attendance were Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips, The Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb and media reporter Alex Bruel, The Atlantic CEO and runner extraordinaire Nick Thompson, Feed Me proprietor Emily Sundberg, Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright, Hearst svp of public affairs David Carey, Refinery29 founders turned coffee energy drink entrepreneurs Philippe von Borries and Justin Stefano, Ziff CEO Vivek Shah, Adweek CEO Will Lee and media reporter Mark Stenberg, Atlas Obscura CEO Louise Story, former Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens, Racquet Media founder Caitlin Thompson, Dynamo founder Nich Carlson, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel, Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, The Information COO Matt Resnick, The Dispatch president Mike Rothman, and many more. 

Thanks to Joe Marchese and his team for making the party happen. Every office should have a receptionist desk that converts into a bar. 

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The Washington Post has been in some amounts of turmoil for the past two years. The latest controversy is its new AI personalized podcasts that contained inaccuracies and fabricated quotes. Anyone who has used ChatGPT can relate.

The rollout has stoked complaints from the editorial side. After all, accuracy is sacrosanct in journalism, and inaccuracy is not a great way to build trust. Semafor’s Max Tani has good reporting on this.

The Post is not pulling the product, taking the stance that this is how tech products are built. After all, SpaceX has lost plenty of rockets. It highlights the tension between the traditions of journalism and the standard approaches to building tech.

Vineet Khosla, CTO of The Washington Post, spoke to me prior to this rollout. I wanted to speak with Vineet to get a better understanding of how he thinks of building news products in the age of AI. Vineet joined the Post in 2023 from Uber. Prior to that, he was part of the team that built Siri as an AI engineer. 

Vineet argues the news industry grew up with extraordinarily stable product-market fit, which conditioned it to optimize for correctness rather than speed. “Media had too much success,” he told me. “News is a really good business. It has a product market fit like nothing else on the planet.”

The tech instinct is to ship, observe, and iterate, while the media instinct is to prevent error at all costs. That gap widens whenever a new technology wave hits, because experimentation looks reckless to people trained to avoid mistakes. “Getting something slightly wrong is not the end of the world [in tech],” he said, “but getting something slightly wrong in the world of media is often perceived as the end of the world.”

Vineet also believes the old assumption that journalism alone is the product is no longer viable. The container, the interface, and the user flow are now just as central to the value proposition as the underlying reporting. “News is the core of the product, but the product is also the product.”

Publishers lost attention not because their reporting deteriorated, but because platforms built better user experiences. Vineet’s point is that distribution shifted to whoever built the most intuitive containers, not the most authoritative newsrooms. “They are moving because the container, the product that Instagram is putting out, is attracting them. Instagram has zero journalists.”

He’s adamant that publishers trap themselves by accepting a supplier mindset. Once they see themselves as content wholesalers to someone else’s interface, the strategic game is already lost. “When you start the conversation saying, ‘we are the content providers,’ you already put yourself in a hole,” he said. “Why are you not the platform?”

The uniform article built for mass readership makes less and less sense in a world where users come in with wildly different levels of context. “How silly it is to assume that one person wrote an article for 800 words, and there are 100 million people who had the same curiosity.”

AI expands the surface area of journalism rather than compressing it. Reporters can work in whatever medium suits their craft, and AI remixes it into the forms readers prefer. “If you think about a topic and want to write a book, go ahead. Let that get fed into AI and let people consume it the way they want.”

Voice is a natural interface because it removes the cognitive overhead of navigating screens. The industry has overestimated the necessity of visual UI at a moment when conversational systems have finally matured. “Everybody on this planet can talk. That was the whole promise of Siri: just talk to your computer.”

A news experience built around conversation is fundamentally different from one built around static pages. The personalized podcast he describes is an example: a user interrupts, asks follow-ups, gets tailored context, and then returns to the flow. “You will be able to interrupt that podcast and ask it questions… and then go back to your podcast.”

AI becomes infrastructure for the tedious layers of news production, not a replacement for original reporting. The value shifts toward human judgment, interpretation, and reporting while machines handle rote translation, summarization, and recomposition. “Let AI do the sucky part of your job. AI cannot do investigative journalism and AI cannot do deep analysis.”

Listen to the conversation with Vineet

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