“I Can’t Sugarcoat It Anymore”: Will Lewis Bluntly Defends Washington Post Shake-Up

When Washington Post publisher Will Lewis and new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff Monday, the newsroom was still coming to terms with the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021.

“Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

Murray, who previously led The Wall Street Journal, will replace Buzbee as executive editor through the presidential election, at which point, Robert Winnett, a veteran of the UK’s Telegraph Media Group, will take on the new role of editor. Murray will move over to a new division of the paper that Lewis referred to as its “third newsroom”—Opinions being the second—which will focus on “service and social media journalism” and run separately from the core news operation.

Lewis explained to staff that the news “began to leak out, which is why we had to scramble last night.” Indeed, I’ve learned that The New York Times was chasing a story on Buzbee’s potential resignation, and the Post didn’t want to get scooped. Hence the 8:40 p.m. staff memo from Lewis announcing that Buzbee would be stepping down. Senior editors close to Buzbee didn’t know this news was coming, according to two sources familiar with the situation. “We found out on a Sunday evening in an email. That’s not how well-functioning companies announce major personnel news,” one staffer told me. “What the fuck—that’s how I feel right now.” (The Times got their story up before the Post, as Playbook pointed out on Monday morning.)

During the Monday meeting, Lewis said, “We need world-class journalism every single day, and the people that are coming in to help us do that will be a real benefit to the organization.” He said he “really enjoyed working with Sally” and “wish[ed] it could have gone on for longer, but it couldn’t.” As far as diversity goes, Lewis admitted “it’s not great” and vowed to do better going forward.

Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause. Lewis said there will be “significant opportunities” within the new organizational structure. Asked by another staffer about which people he met with, Lewis said, “It was an iterative, messy process, which I don’t want to go into the details of.”

At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

He continued to take a blunt approach when asked about the “third newsroom,” specifically how it would be staffed. “I’ll be looking for people to put their hands up internally, but also sourcing talent externally,” said Lewis. (Of the “third newsroom,” Lewis said in Sunday’s memo, “The aim is to give the millions of Americans—who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed—compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”)

“Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

“So we’re just going to give up on—”

“No, I want you to be inspired,” Lewis said. “It’s the most important thing: untapped audiences. If what I cause to happen is you all get it, great, but the game is up,” he said. “I’m setting up a structure where I’m not going to be guessing.”

It had looked like business as usual in the days leading up to Sunday’s shake-up. Buzbee, along with managing editor Matea Gold, attended a White House News Photographer Association gala on Saturday night. Buzbee had been in the hub running coverage when Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on 34 felony counts, and there’d been no signal of a coming change at the top during the town hall just one day earlier, where Lewis—joined by Buzbee onstage—mapped out his vision for resuscitating the Post’s business. A Post spokesperson declined to comment.

That being said, the general consensus inside the Post was that Buzbee was not long for the top job. Lewis, the former Dow Jones chief executive and Journal publisher, has been bringing his own people into other parts of the company since he was named CEO and publisher last year—including hiring Karl Wells as chief growth officer in January and Suzi Watford as chief strategy editor in April—and staff sensed it was only a matter of time before he did the same in the newsroom. Both Wells and Watford worked at Dow Jones. As did Murray, whom Lewis appointed to lead the Journal back in 2018.

Lewis also worked with Winnett at the UK’s The Sunday Times and, in 2007, hired him at The Daily Telegraph, the right-leaning British paper that Lewis, himself, was recently looking to purchase along with investors. Winnett, Lewis wrote Sunday, will oversee “our core coverage areas, including politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.” By the end of the year, the Post will become one more newsroom—along with The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Bloomberg News—run by a British news executive.

“The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

Buzbee never seemed to fully find her groove at the Post, despite journalistic achievements like the paper nabbing the Pulitzer last month for national reporting. She succeeded legendary editor Marty Baron, already a tall order, made even more challenging by the fact that most employees weren’t even in the newsroom due to the COVID pandemic. When I profiled Buzbee a year into the job, it was evident that staffers were still trying to get a handle on the paper’s leader. She had spent her entire career at the Associated Press and brought a more low-key style to a high-profile job. “It’s a place that is perhaps unusually attached to taking direction from the very top,” one Post reporter said at the time. “So to not have that, I think, is very unsettling to a lot of people.”

Then came the reported tension between her and then publisher Fred Ryan, economic windfalls, and major cost-cutting measures, including buyouts for more than 200 employees across the Post’s staff. After Ryan’s departure, a third staffer said, “There just wasn’t a lot of energy left.” With Lewis’s appointment, “I think it was understood that Sally was kind of a dead woman walking,” the second staffer said. But given that Lewis did not make an immediate change to Buzbee’s role when he began in January, the expectation was that he would wait until after the presidential election. Instead, he made the move five months before Election Day, amid a historical news cycle.

According to The New York Times, Buzbee told colleagues on a Sunday night call that Lewis was pushing for aggressive changes at the paper, and she “would have preferred to stay to help us get through this period, but it just got to the point where it wasn’t possible.”

“I don’t think she deserved to go out this way,” the first staffer told me, noting that in conversations with their colleagues, people “don’t feel good about the fact that the first female executive editor of The Washington Post got a one paragraph goodbye note at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and that she’s being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”

That one paragraph featured praise from Lewis, who called Buzbee “an incredible leader and a supremely talented media executive.” Though, notably, Buzbee isn’t quoted herself.