When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he said he wanted to give the storied but struggling newspaper the “runway” it needed to take off in the digital age.
A few years later, the plane seemed to be soaring. Readership was up, revenue – built on new digital subscriptions – was up, and the newsroom’s scrappy staff was trading scoops daily with the New York Times, and doing essential journalism, particularly during the campaign and administration of Donald Trump.
Bezos, wisely, had left the renowned editor Marty Baron in place until he retired in 2021. The billionaire owner, who paid only $250m for the paper, even gave the Post its now-famous motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Post had regained the swagger it had under its legendary publisher Katharine Graham when it broke the Watergate scandal that helped bring down a corrupt president in the 1970s.
But these days, the Post is struggling once again. It lost an estimated $100m last year, readership has dropped dramatically, and a roughly 1,000-person newsroom staff has been shrunk through buyouts and layoffs.
Enter Will Lewis, a hard-driving British journalist who had been publisher of the Wall Street Journal. In January, Bezos named him the Post’s publisher and CEO.
So far, it’s been a rocky reign, with this past week especially chaotic.
Lewis made several heavy-handed moves that have alienated and angered an extraordinarily talented journalistic staff. He abruptly forced out Sally Buzbee, who had succeeded Baron to become the paper’s first female editor, and immediately replaced her with two of his former colleagues, even as he revealed his plans for a radically restructured newsroom. (The former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and former Telegraph deputy editor Rob Winnett will lead two adjacent Post newsrooms, including a new one dedicated to “service and social media journalism”; and then they’ll switch roles after November’s election. Yes, it’s all very weird.)
Taken by surprise and baffled, the staff reacted angrily and with skepticism. At a “town hall” meeting on Monday, the prominent politics reporter Ashley Parker challenged Lewis’s decision-making, earning applause from her colleagues. “Now we have four white men running the newsroom,” she said, according to the news non-profit Notus. (She was referring to Lewis himself, Murray, Winnett and David Shipley, the opinion section editor; it’s worth noting that, although the Post considers itself a global, not local, newsroom, more than 40% of Washington DC residents are Black.)
And a top investigative reporter, Carol Leonnig, reportedly pushed back on leadership changes, noting “you’ve chosen people with a very different culture from the Washington Post,” apparently because they reflect Fleet Street’s tabloid culture and the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal.
Lewis grew testy and defensive, according to published reports and my own conversations with Post journalists.
“We are going to turn this thing around but let’s not sugarcoat it,” Lewis said, according to the Post’s own reporting. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”
He also claimed that he enjoyed working with Buzbee and wished that could have continued. That came off as disingenuous, as did his pledges of diversity in leadership.
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“No one was buying what he was selling,” Notus quoted one attendee.
I worked at the Post as media columnist from 2016 to 2022. I know my former colleagues to be top-flight and much of their journalism to be essential. They are also nimble and, in general, not resistant to change. They fully understand that we’re in a challenging new era. But they also are tough-minded journalists who demand to be treated with transparency and honesty and respect.
Journalists don’t delude themselves that newsrooms are democracies; they know they don’t get a vote. But successful newsrooms aren’t dictatorships, either.
If Lewis is going to be successful in his quest to make the Post soar again, he’ll need to have the journalists with him all the way. Right now, they’re not. And that means a course correction is in order.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture