(Reuters) -The Washington Post said on Monday Fred Ryan would step down as its CEO in August after a near decade-long stint at the newspaper owned by Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos.
The Post has named Patty Stonesifer as its interim chief executive, turning to the non-profit veteran who was the founding CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Stonesifer has also served on the boards of Amazon and Rockefeller Foundation.
Ryan will move on to lead the newly formed nonpartisan Center on Public Civility at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Post said.
Named CEO in September 2014 just about a year after Bezos took ownership of the Post, Ryan was handpicked by the billionaire to drive the storied newspaper's digital expansion.
During his tenure, the Post boosted its digital subscriptions, won 13 Pulitzer Prizes and launched the Arc XP (NASDAQ:XP) cloud-based digital platform that serves more than 1,900 sites in 28 countries, according to the company.
Ryan's exit comes at a time when the media industry has undertaken layoffs and other cost cuts to cope with a decline in audiences and advertisement revenue due to an uncertain economy.
Earlier in January, the Post, home to journalists such as the "Watergate" team of Bob Woodward (NASDAQ:WWD) and Carl Bernstein, said it laid off 20 staffers and will keep another 30 vacancies unfilled.