The Washington Post is shrinking and sinking, and fast. Amid continuing losses, the news organization is wrapping up its second employee buyout in 18 months.
This one will clear out about three dozen of its most accomplished reporters, editors and opinion columnists (Jonathan Capehart, Catherine Rampell, David Von Drehle). This is a trend, unfortunately: In January, the Post laid off about 100 people on its business side, about 4 percent of its workforce. A buyout at the end of 2023 shooed away about 240 people, or 10 percent of its business and news staffs (including me).
The enfeebling of one of the world’s great news organizations is a small tragedy, a loss for democracy and the marketplace of ideas. It’s also a promising development for the tyrants and frauds the Post has historically exposed.
Some of this decline, maybe even most of it, is a result of irresistible market forces—the rise of social media, shifting reader habits, fleeing advertisers. But some has been self-inflicted.
Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner, hired Will Lewis as the paper’s publisher and chief executive in late 2023. A British journalist, media entrepreneur and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Sir Will seemed like a plausible and promising choice. There was little reason, in any case, to second guess the personnel decisions and managerial acumen of Bezos, who founded and built Amazon into a planetary colossus.
Bezos himself had overseen a miraculous (if short-lived) revival of the Post a few years after buying it in 2013, with an injection of money, talent and technical savvy. He affixed a new slogan to the Post’s front page and home page like a crown: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
But rather than reversing the Post’s slide, Lewis at times has been an agent of it. His memo to the Post’s staff earlier this month about the impending buyout was suggestive of the state of play. Dispensing with the usual bromides about shared burdens, he went right to flashing the brass knuckles. “As we continue in this new direction I want to ask those who do not feel aligned with the company’s new plan,” he wrote. “…If you think it’s time to move on to a new chapter, the [buyout] helps you take that new step with more security.”
Message: Get with the program or get out.
What exactly that program is is a huge part of the problem.
Lewis enjoyed a brief honeymoon upon his arrival at the Post early last year. “A relentlessly charming Brit,” as Semafor put it, he wooed the newsroom with his energetic promotion of a rebuilding plan he dubbed “fix it, build it, scale it.”
But by May, Lewis and the Post’s editor, Sally Buzbee, were feuding. The new CEO offered Buzbee, the first woman to serve as editor in chief in the Post’s 147-year history, a demotion. She declined, and resigned—a development Lewis announced to his shocked staff on a Sunday night.
It soon emerged that Lewis and Buzbee had privately clashed over the Post’s pursuit of questions about Lewis himself, specifically his role more than a decade ago in cleaning up the sprawling phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. Lewis had discouraged Buzbee and the Post from digging into his work for Murdoch, an egregious conflict of interest.
Lewis deepened the antipathy by demeaning a respected NPR journalist who reported that Lewis had tried to suppress his inquiries about the hacking operation a few months earlier. Faced with contentious questions about his conduct at an all-staff meeting, Lewis abruptly cut it short and walked out.
The Buzbee affair set off a chain reaction that Lewis has seemed incapable of arresting. Lewis’ plan to replace Buzbee with a former British associate, Robert Winnett, quickly fell apart amid questions about Winnett’s past newsgathering practices. An exodus began; journalists began leaving the Post for the New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Some 400 staffers urged Bezos to step in. They received no reply.
Lewis wasn’t the primary author of the most damaging event, but he was the public face of it. Just 11 days before the fall election, he spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, declaring—much to the surprise of his own opinion staff—that the Post was no longer in the business of endorsing presidential candidates. Subscribers read the decision as a favor to Donald Trump, and began cancelling their subscriptions.
Bezos remained silent at first, letting Lewis serve as his heat shield, but then acknowledged that he had made the call. By then, the number of cancelled subscriptions was approaching 200,000, or roughly 10 percent of its total digital subscribers.
In the intervening months, some of that damage has been repaired. The Post has aggressively covered the second Trump Administration, with notable scoops that have won back some of its lost subscribers. The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, however, have been the biggest scoop-getters. It is a sign of lost opportunity that many of those stories have been broken by former Post journalists.
But longer-term questions remain. One is about the fate of the Post’s editorial page, which Bezos said in February would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” The announcement led to another, albeit smaller cancel-my-subscription frenzy, and the resignation of the section’s editor, David Shipley. In his place, Lewis hired a young and virtually unknown journalist, Adam O’Neal, whose resume includes only one short stint as an editorial manager. That gig reportedly didn’t go too well.
Most critically, Lewis’ signature initiative for reversing the Post’s trajectory remains a work in progress. In July of last year, he announced the creation of a “third newsroom” (the news and opinion operations are the first and second newsrooms) to produce videos, newsletters, podcasts and live events under a separate subscription. He appointed a respected editor, Krissah Thompson, to head the effort.
But six months after it began, “the third newsroom”—renamed WP Ventures—is still bumping down the runway. According to a LinkedIn post by Thompson this week, a small team of “journalist-creators” has begun producing videos for social media; other “experiments” are underway. WP Ventures hasn’t yet produced much. What’s more, the program is in flux; on Tuesday, the Post announced that it was moving the project off-site and placing it under a general manager rather than an editor. As for Thompson? She’s taking the buyout.
Some 18 months in, Lewis’ grand vision for the Post not only hasn’t been realized, it isn’t really clear to the outside world what that vision is.
A spokesperson for the Post told me, “The Post has been transforming all aspects of its business to not merely meet the moment but to thrive in it. As we undergo this significant reinvention, The Post continues to excel in producing high quality and impactful journalism and we will continue to deliver riveting storytelling.”
Bezos’ continuing loyalty to Lewis remains baffling. Wouldn’t Bezos, surely one of the world’s smartest and most accomplished businessmen, have changed course if his handpicked CEO at Amazon had crushed employee morale and achieved as little as Lewis has at the Post? Doesn’t Bezos care about the slow-motion implosion of an institution whose value transcends its bottom line?
After all this time, the most logical conclusion is heartbreaking: No, he doesn’t.
The post Opinion: Why This Man Proves Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Care About the Washington Post appeared first on The Daily Beast.
