NEW YORK — The struggling Washington Post found itself in some turmoil on Monday after the abrupt departure of the newspaper’s executive editor and a hastily announced restructuring plan intended to stem the exodus of readers over the past few years.
Post editor Will Lewis and Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal editor named to temporarily replace Sally Buzbee, met with Post reporters and editors on Monday to explain the changes that were outlined in an email on Sunday night.
The plan includes dividing the newsroom into three separate divisions, with managers who report to Lewis — one covering the Post’s top stories, one with opinion pieces and the third dedicated to attracting new consumers through innovative uses of social media, video, artificial intelligence and sales.
Although Murray is temporarily replacing Buzbee during November’s presidential election, the final plan does not put anyone in the role of executive editor overseeing the entire newsroom. It was said that Buzbee disagreed with the plan and chose to leave rather than be put in charge of one of the divisions, the Post reported.
Lewis was not available for an interview Monday and Buzbee did not immediately return a message.
“It definitely caught people by surprise,” said Paul Farhi, a recently retired Post media reporter. “But this shows that Will Lewis it is operating from a sense of crisis and urgency. He’s only been there five months and is making massive changes to the newsroom.”
Like most news organizations, the Post has lost readers — a decline made more acute as the Washington-based outlet has grown with interest in politics during the Trump administration. The Post’s website had 101 million unique visitors per month in 2020 and dropped to 50 million by the end of 2023. The Post lost about $77 million last year.
“Although Jeff Bezos (owner of the Post) is very rich, I’ve observed that billionaires don’t like losing money,” said Margaret Sullivan, a former Post columnist and now executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Journalism. Security at the Columbia Journalism School.
Lewis told team members on Monday that “I’m not interested in managing the decline. I’m interested in growing,” said a person who participated in the meeting. The new publisher also bluntly told employees that “people aren’t reading your stuff. We need to take decisive action.”
The new division designed to attract new customers — the Post called it the “third newsroom” — is steeped in mystery. While the Post once housed the people who ran its digital products in a separate building, for several years it integrated that and social media into the regular newsroom, as have many organizations. It’s difficult to predict how the new structure will work, and there will likely be changes as it is implemented, Sullivan said.
“Maybe it will be brilliant and innovative,” she said. “But that seems strange to me.”
There are significant questions surrounding the restructuring — including suggestions that splitting the newsroom into three parts could create fragmentation of the Post’s overall reporting. Will separation into different units impede the kind of collaboration that creates fluid multiplatform journalism?
“It feels so retro – reminiscent of search engine optimization, social media, and the shift to video, just as AI and agents threaten to become the new web,” said Jeff Jarvis, Jarvis, author of “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its lessons for the Internet age.”
Murray will be in charge of this division after the election. After that, Robert Winnett, a longtime Telegraph editor in England who worked with Lewis there, will take over the Post’s main reporting duties, the paper said.
There was some concern expressed by Post staff members about three men – all of them new to a paper that prides itself on journalists rising through the ranks and two of them born in the UK – being in charge at a crucial time.
“Within a few months, two UK-born editors will run the flagship newspaper in the US capital,” Farhi said. “It was kind of unimaginable a few months ago.”
They will not be alone. Other US-based news organizations with UK-born leaders included The Wall Street Journal, with editor-in-chief Emma Tucker; CNN, with president and CEO Marcos Thompson; and the Associated Press, with Daisy Veerasingham as president and CEO.
Lewis was also asked about his commitment to diversity following the departure of the Post’s first female editor in charge. He said he was committed to that “and you’ll see that going forward,” according to the person present at the meeting.
Lewis said the Post will experiment with different payment tiers for digital subscriptions, for people who might be interested in specific topics or stories rather than the full package, similar to products offered by Politico, for example. As editor, Buzbee has beefed up the Post’s coverage of topics like food and weather that appeal to specific readers.
Lewis talked about looking for ways to reach millions of Americans who want to stay informed but don’t feel traditional news products meet their needs.
In a sense, efforts to make organizations like the Post and Times more attractive to subscribers may contribute to trends undermining local news, Farhi said. As newspapers look for more national and international clients, he said, they are much less likely to invest in local news coverage.
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David Bauder writes about media for the Associated Press. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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