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

“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 a week earlier, when 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 when she started 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 historic 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.