Will Lewis, the former CEO and publisher of the Washington Post, had a terrible tenure at the paper. The two years he spent there, which ended Saturday with a two-paragraph memo, are chiefly notable for a series of cuts and layoffs, culminating in a 30% bloodletting last week.
But let’s be clear: This one is on Jeff Bezos.
Most obviously, that’s because Bezos owns the Post, and Bezos was the one who hired Lewis to run the business for him.
Bezos was also the one signing off on Lewis’s actions at the paper, which mostly amounted to making the paper smaller while telling the staff that “people are not reading your stuff.”
And slightly less obviously, it was Bezos who dramatically worsened the Post’s business outlook. He decided not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, weeks before the election — a move that outraged many Post readers, who saw the non-endorsement an attempt to cater to Donald Trump.
That led to more than 250,000 subscriber cancellations, a huge problem for a paper whose circulation peaked at 3 million in 2021.
The best case argument you could make for Lewis era at the Post, if you are inclined, would go something like this: Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 and then invested heavily in staff, realized a few years ago that he now employed many more people than his business would support. So he brought Lewis in to do the grim work of shrinking the publication. Now that work is done, so Lewis can do something else and Bezos can find someone to help the Post grow again.
But the timing of Lewis’ departure — late afternoon on a Saturday, following days of howling from Post employees and many others about Lewis and Bezos’ stewardship of the paper — suggests this was not a long-in-the-making move.
And again, whether Lewis jumped or was pushed doesn’t matter in the end. The Washington Post is Jeff Bezos. He gets praise if things are going well — which, for several years after his purchase, seemed to be the case — and blame when it doesn’t.
Here I’ll also point out that Bezos, who has no problem being seen jet-setting around the world in a style befitting the world’s fourth-richest man, has been totally MIA during his paper’s recent turmoil.
On Saturday, when the paper announced it had promoted Post CFO Jeff D’Onofrio to acting publisher and CEO, Bezos finally attached his name to a public statement, promising that the new Post would thrive by giving readers things they wanted to read.
“The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he said in a Post press release.
That might qualify for an insight 30 years ago, when newspapers were struggling to respond to the internet. Now that’s table stakes, and you would hope the guy who created Amazon has more up his sleeve.
“I have a bunch of ideas,” for the Post, Bezos said in the fall of 2024. “I’m working on that right now.”
We’re still waiting.
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