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

“Don’t we need our intellectual social journalists and repair journalists as embedded in our core product to be obvious that folks are in actuality discovering out the object that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis responded, “You haven’t performed it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. In fact, it’s true no longer happening.”

“So we’re true going to give up on—”

“No, I need you to be impressed,” Lewis mentioned. “It’s the biggest thing: untapped audiences. If what I cause to happen is you all get it, huge, however the sport is up,” he mentioned. “I’m constructing a construction the build I’m no longer going to be guessing.”

It had looked love enterprise as typical in the times leading as a lot as Sunday’s shake-up. Buzbee, alongside with managing editor Matea Gold, attended a White Dwelling Records Photographer Affiliation gala on Saturday evening. Buzbee had been in the hub running protection when Donald Trump used to be convicted Thursday on 34 felony counts, and there’d been no signal of a coming trade at the tip all over the city hall every week earlier, when Lewis—joined by Buzbee onstage—mapped out his vision for resuscitating the Post’s enterprise. A Post spokesperson declined to comment.

That being mentioned, the everyday consensus all the arrangement in which thru the Post used to be that Buzbee used to be no longer lengthy for the tip job. Lewis, the outmoded Dow Jones chief govt and Journal publisher, has been bringing his fill of us into other capabilities of the company since he used to be named CEO and publisher last year—including hiring Karl Wells as chief divulge officer in January, and Suzi Watford as chief technique editor in April—and workers sensed it used to be fully a matter of time earlier than he did the a similar in the newsroom. Both Wells and Watford worked at Dow Jones. As did Murray, whom Lewis appointed to manual the Journal support in 2018.

Lewis also worked with Winnett at the UK’s The Sunday Times and, in 2007, employed him at The Day-to-day Telegraph, the fine-leaning British paper that Lewis, himself, used to be right now taking a look for to bewitch alongside with merchants. Winnett, Lewis wrote Sunday, will oversee “our core protection areas, including politics, investigations, enterprise, technology, sports and capabilities.” By the cease of the year, the Post will change into one extra newsroom—alongside with The Wall Road Journal, CNN, and Bloomberg Records—roam by a British facts govt.

“The very fact that Will Lewis retains going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post management implies that he finds every person lacking, and I mediate that’s extra or less essentially the most anxious thing,” a second staffer told me.

Buzbee by no system regarded to completely secure her groove at the Post, despite journalistic achievements love the paper nabbing the Pulitzer last month for national reporting. She succeeded legendary editor Marty Baron, already a huge show, made even extra sharp by the indisputable fact that most workers weren’t even in the newsroom when she began attributable to the COVID pandemic. After I profiled Buzbee a year into the job, it used to be evident that staffers were quiet seeking to get a address on the paper’s chief. She had spent her complete profession at the Associated Press and introduced a extra low-key vogue to a excessive-profile job. “It’s a space that is probably going strangely linked to taking direction from the very top,” one Post reporter mentioned at the time. “So that you can no longer include that, I mediate, is awfully unsettling to a mode of of us.”

Then came the reported rigidity between her after which publisher Fred Ryan, economic windfalls, and most essential mark-cutting measures, including buyouts for further than 200 workers all the arrangement in which thru the Post’s workers. After Ryan’s departure, a Third staffer mentioned, “There true wasn’t a mode of energy left.” With Lewis’s appointment, “I mediate it used to be understood that Sally used to be extra or less a dull girl walking,” the second staffer mentioned. But provided that Lewis did no longer get a true now trade to Buzbee’s role when he began in January, the expectation used to be that he would wait until after the presidential election. As a replacement, he made the switch 5 months earlier than Election Day, amid a historic facts cycle.

In accordance with The New York Times, Buzbee told colleagues on a Sunday evening call that Lewis used to be pushing for aggressive modifications at the paper, and she “would include most popular to dangle to support us get thru this length, but it true bought to the level the build it wasn’t that probabilities are you will likely well narrate.”

“I don’t mediate she deserved to exit this arrangement,” the first staffer told me, noting that in conversations with their colleagues, of us “don’t in actuality feel factual about the indisputable fact that the first feminine govt editor of The Washington Post bought a one paragraph goodbye level to at 8: 30 p.m. on a Sunday, and that she’s being modified by extra white men we don’t know.”

That one paragraph featured reward from Lewis, who called Buzbee “an wonderful chief and a supremely proficient media govt.” Even supposing, seriously, Buzbee isn’t quoted herself.