The Washington Post CEO Will Lewis is under fire for attending Super Bowl festivities in San Francisco shortly after the newspaper axed its sports desk as part of sweeping layoffs.
A photo of Lewis, 56, walking the red carpet of the NFL Honors ceremony on Thursday evening went viral on X, amassing nearly 750,000 views in under 24 hours.
He attended the event one day after The Washington Post announced layoffs affecting roughly 300 employees, including the dismantling of its sports department in its existing form.
Lewis did not participate in the conference call held on Wednesday to inform staff of the cuts. Several laid-off employees pointed out his absence on social media.
Nicki Jhabvala, a reporter for The Athletic and a former Washington Post journalist, posted the image of Lewis on X alongside a critical message.
“Will Lewis was too busy to join the call to tell his staff he’s destroying the @washingtonpost sports department yesterday… but he did have time to walk the red carpet at NFL Honors here in San Francisco today. Amazing,” Jhabvala wrote.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Post, appointed Lewis at the end of 2023.
Asked about Lewis’ absence from the layoff call, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told Fox News that Lewis “had a lot of things to tend to today.”
One editor who was laid off on Wednesday blamed Lewis for the cuts.
“Will Lewis’s legacy (already pretty bleak to begin with) will be having enabled Bezos to tank an American institution,” the laid-off employee told The Guardian. “And he wasn’t even brave enough to face his staffers more than once in his tenure at The Post. Embarrassing to say the least.”
Lewis was also heavily criticized by journalists and former staffers for the Post on X.
“Will Lewis has gone to Super Bowl every year since joining Washington Post… which is not a great excuse for missing a Zoom call,” wrote Puck News’ Dylan Byers.
Josh Dawsey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote: “The paper no longer has a sports department, but Will Lewis is in California walking the NFL red carpet?”
“It’s unfathomable that Will Lewis still has a job. Not one thing he has done since he started two years ago has drawn in subscribers, in fact everything he has done has lost hundreds of thousands,” Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent at Puck News, wrote.
“He has not stopped the financial bleed but exacerbated it. Will Lewis is a failure, an absent ‘leader,’ and hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs for it and he has offered NO plan of how to turn the paper around. cc @JeffBezos.”
Robert McCartney, a former Washington Post editor, also criticized Lewis on X in the wake of the cuts: “Ethically challenged publisher Will Lewis, a Murdoch veteran with no clue about how to revive The Post, doesn’t have the guts to speak directly to newsroom that he and Bezos are responsible for gutting.”
Meanwhile, Washington Post union members posted signs in Lewis’ Washington, D.C., neighborhood protesting the layoffs, saying he was “wanted for destroying the Washington Post.”
“Scan the QR code to send a letter to Post management demanding they stop these cuts,” the poster read.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Washington Post for comment.
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