A few years ago, The Washington Post was leading a new era of American journalism, with Donald Trump’s norm-defying presidency providing the stories and eyeballs that turned web traffic into digital subscriptions and advertising. The surge in news consumption delivered cash flow and a path to profitability after years of declining print revenues. An expanded newsroom made possible by the vast wealth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post for $250 million in 2013, had ended the cuts and strategic drift that saw the paper lose relevance, even in its home town, during the first internet era. This time around it seemed different.
The Post’s latest three Pulitzer Prizes arrived in May, but this year’s accolades landed in a fog of disillusion. The Trump bump had long gone, traffic and digital ads, along with subscribers, had plummeted. Most critically of all, the paper had become less sure of itself. The latest annual loss – $77million – was too much to take, even for Bezos. A wave of cuts at the end of 2022 and again, but bigger, in 2023 signalled he was an ordinary owner after all, ending the decade-long mystique around him.
“The business side has been a catastrophe. Those Pulitzers are not a prize. They’re a warning that you can do top-notch reporting but if your biz side sucks, then you lose a fortune,” says one former Post staffer who was shown the door, along with more than 200 colleagues, last December. Executive changes and deeper scrutiny about why Bezos ever bought a newspaper
brought headline-grabbing changes around the same time. Will Lewis, chosen as the Post’s new publisher, was the biggest, but his January start has been overshadowed by allegations that, while employed in London at News International, he ordered millions of emails to be deleted from the company’s servers in 2011 when police were still investigating the phone-hacking scandal that continues to plague Rupert Murdoch’s legacy media empire.
Lewis, who has been implicated, but not charged, in British court documents, denies wrongdoing. He has also refused to answer questions about his conduct – most notably, questions from Post journalists – adding to suspicion about him in Washington. He arrived with the task of finding a new way to make quality journalism pay. But instead of a transatlantic triumph of ambition to the leadership of one of the world’s most storied newspapers, he has met a newsroom filled with Americans who wonder why he is there. His past role as a Murdoch enforcer and his methods while a reporter and editor have drawn ire. American journalism has had plenty of its own scandals but at the Post ethics are something other than a mispronounced English county. They don’t like the attention Lewis has brought. Can he survive such an environment? Will Bezos continue to back him?
To understand what has gone wrong takes some knowledge of the differences between how British and American journalists expect to be treated. Such understanding initially appears to have eluded, or been ignored, by Lewis. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” he told staff in May. American newsrooms, after a pandemic that ushered in sometimes deafening messaging about diversity and inclusion, prefer “we” and “us” to impersonal pronouns. Somewhere between being editor-in-chief at The Daily Telegraph in the noughties, a general manager at News International, and later an executive and publisher at The Wall Street Journal, Lewis appears to have missed the cultural switch.
Such sensibilities are not confined to Gen Z-ers in Washington. The Post retains lots of older journalists – more about them later – used to the ups and downs of a rocky trade, but like their younger colleagues, they have been triggered by having their work lambasted by someone seemingly reliant on charm when it suits and a more bruising tone when required.
Lewis wears trainers – $1,100 calfskin and suede Zegna trainers, reportedly – rather than brogues these days, but he has been lead-footed nonetheless, gaining a reputation as a blathering Brit, rather than a saviour for the Post.
As well as his disastrous newsroom speech, he described David Folkenflik, a well-regarded US media reporter and Murdoch chronicler as an “activist”, rather than a journalist. The Post newsroom, as well as most knowledgeable journalists, knew better. Folkenflik, who works for National Public Radio (NPR), is an independent-minded hack who hits hard, no matter the target. In other words, the kind of person most journalists like more than the executives who sit above a newsroom and whose tenure often ends up decimating it or commoditising its news products.
After his appointment, many expected Lewis to pick a new executive editor. Just not in the way that he ultimately did. Sally Buzbee, who had replaced the revered Marty Baron in June 2021, left less than a month after those recent Pulitzers. She and Lewis reputedly clashed – in March and again in May – over reporting on the latter’s supposed involvement in the hacking clean-up. It was the day after the “Sunday night massacre” that ended Buzbee’s tenure when Lewis delivered his Monday mauling to Post staff.
“Will is brilliant with billionaires, but the NPR thing just seems a bridge too far here, on top of trying to stop Buzbee running those stories,” says one former acquaintance. “No big deal in Britain – standard moves – but doesn’t really fly here. Slamming Folkenflik shows he’s losing his cool.” Lewis’s apparent efforts to limit and discourage the Post’s coverage of phone hacking had the opposite effect in June. The Post and The New York Times went after him, leading to page one stories in both papers on the same day. A stream of unflattering details followed.
American papers keep each other straight
Such internal newsroom scrutiny is anathema in London, but stateside there is still enough media accountability to apply pressure. The Times and Post stories were wounding enough to end Lewis’s plan to bring old Daily Telegraph ally Robert Winnett to Washington as the Post’s next executive editor, an appointment that had put him under pressure. Lewis should have seen this coming; Winnett had not worked in America, let alone at the Post, where bosses tend to rise from within. People noticed the experience gap, especially in a presidential election year.
A reversal on Winnett, after the Post made allegations about the man meant to be coming inside the tent as their boss, has bought Lewis some time, but his early missteps have created a greater credibility crisis. His position seems more Tom Wambsgans than Katharine Graham. Does anyone want to work with him with the phone-hacking accusations unresolved? For now, they are waiting to see what Lewis does next with the paper he leads.
For all the talk about ethics, the Post’s problems are financial. Other media organisations are also shedding jobs. Put simply, with everyone in the shit, the Post is not a place people want to leave. When Lewis worked as a journalist in Britain, newsroom culture revolved around “the story” and little else. Bollockings were accepted, with forgiveness to follow, if the job
was done. Botched decision-making remains common, but the Post has its own system of checks and balances. The Winnett move was done without the due process considered necessary under the collegiate environment Post staff expect, and without the 21st century reality of a diverse and inclusive workforce and the growing legal requirements that surround that.
Lewis has since changed tone, starting in an email in mid-June, where he admitted trust has been lost. “Time for some humility from me,” he wrote. “I need to improve how well I listen and how well I communicate so that we all agree more clearly on where urgent improvements are needed and why.”
It is hard to imagine him being so humbled were he still under the Murdoch empire. Emma Tucker, Lewis’s former colleague and now editor-in-chief at The Wall Street Journal, has been conducting her own bunker-busting staff cuts in the first half of 2024. Redundancies at the Journal’s Washington bureau were done in around 10 minutes, but without broader fallout. So perhaps the Post’s staff should not be too harsh on their new, if under fire, boss. Regardless, some seem far from happy. “I’m not sure I’d call anything he’s done a lengthy apology,” says one departmental chief. “But it doesn’t appear he’s going to leave.”
The broader problems remain. Fewer Americans are paying for quality journalism than they were in the Trump presidency. News fatigue is part of it, and possibly why Lewis wants a third news department that seeks to attract non-traditional audiences that one day might, just might, pay. Lewis’s job is to stop the losses and create the kind of industry-defying money machine that The New York Times has become, surviving prophecies of doom. The barriers to the Post making a recovery in the meantime have changed. And the business failures long precede Lewis’s arrival.
“Essentially, the Post has been incredibly late to understanding that their competition isn’t The New York Times – it’s anyone and everyone who makes content for the internet. They really don’t understand the internet, even now,” said a source with knowledge of the Post’s commercial and editorial dynamics. “They’ll post a deep dive piece on Saturday at 10.30am in order to put it in the print edition on Sunday. The NYT proved a decade or more ago that people who read the print/Sunday don’t care if something has been online.”
With Google, Meta and other social platforms giving up on news, technology is moving more to the home page and AI models, rather than search, where other issues have also hobbled the Post of late. “Something about the Post’s proprietary software caused 70 per cent of Google searches to ricochet off the site,” says one Post journalist. “That is insane. It was a known problem through November 2023. Think of the millions of lost eyeballs.”
Perhaps the quietest figure to emerge inside the Post this year has been Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal chief whom Lewis appointed as interim executive editor after Buzbee’s abrupt departure. With Winnett withdrawn from the reckoning, Murray might end up staying. In difficult circumstances, he is seen as part of the solution rather than part of the problem and has been a stabilising influence. But at least half a dozen Post insiders also fancy a tilt at the top job and, this time, it would be unwise to give them anything less than due process. A Post spokeswoman said: “As Mr Lewis said on June 21, we are in line with our best-in-practice recruitment process and a headhunting firm will be appointed shortly.”
For now, Lewis appears determined to ride out the storm, as long as Bezos backs him. When asked about Lewis’s plans for the third newsroom that will seek to use video and social media to attract customers, the Post spokeswoman said the initiative was picking up speed. But how a changed market, filled with the news avoidant will suddenly end and see people return to the Post remains an unanswered question. For now, the words of Marty Baron, perhaps offer the most realistic view of how things slid into reverse when Bezos lost interest in recent years. Recounting a struggle to agree a discernible business strategy for the Post under Fred Ryan, Lewis’s predecessor as publisher, Baron wrote of Bezos: “We needed his counsel. And whatever we settled on doing, we needed his bank account.”
Lewis, with the UK hacking scandal set for hearing in court next year, declined to be interviewed for this article. For a man whose career has relied on revelations, his past now renders him silent. It is an odd position from which to lead any newspaper, let alone The Washington Post.