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Will Lewis, handpicked in 2023 by Jeff Bezos to turn around The Washington Post, is stepping down as chief executive and publisher days after the company fired about 300 of its roughly 800 reporters.
The departure follows the deepest cuts at the paper in recent memory. Lewis came under fire as he was absent when the job cuts were announced, leaving editor-in-chief Matt Murray to explain the layoffs to staff and the media.
“Now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis wrote in a note to colleagues. “During my tenure, difficult decisions have been taken to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.”
Jeff D’Onofrio, the company’s chief financial officer, will become interim chief executive. In a memo, D’Onofrio said the paper was “ending a hard week of change with more change”.
Lewis, a veteran editor and journalist from Britain’s Fleet Street, this week oversaw a plan to drastically cut back the operations of The Washington Post, shutting down entire teams such as its respected sports desk to focus on politics and security.
The plans, which cut about a third of the staff of the newspaper group, were met with outrage from existing and former staff. Marty Baron, the Post’s editor-in-chief at the time of Bezos’s $250mn purchase in 2013, described it as “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organisations”.
Senior management at the Post were livid when they discovered that Lewis was attending festivities around the Super Bowl in San Francisco around the time of the news of the job cuts. It came off as “callous”, said a newsroom source, adding that “the Super Bowl thing was the last straw”.
“Bezos lost patience after the Super Bowl thing,” the person added.
Bezos, in a statement on Saturday, said the Post “has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity”.
D’Onofrio, along with editor Matt Murray and Opinion editor Adam O’Neal, “are positioned to lead The Post into an exciting and thriving next chapter”, he added.
Bezos did not mention Lewis in his statement.
Lewis did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
Lewis was criticised in the newsroom last month for not offering words of public support after a reporter’s home was searched by FBI agents, which was seen as a further escalation of President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media. “We’re under siege from the FBI and the Pentagon and he just walled himself off,” the person said.
The sense that Lewis had lost the newsroom only increased on the day the job cuts were announced. “There was no communication from him about buyouts,” the person added. “He didn’t put out a statement. Senior editorial leadership was furious.”
Prior to joining The Post, Lewis had held several high-profile jobs in the media, including editor of The Daily Telegraph, a senior journalist at the Financial Times and publisher of the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Wall Street Journal.
Lewis was brought in to revive the fortunes of the newspaper. But instead, hundreds of thousands of readers deserted the title as he imposed a series of poorly received restructuring efforts.
In 2024, the Post pulled its endorsement for a US presidential candidate just days before the election. A reported 250,000 subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the move.
Bezos gutted The Post’s opinion section last year to focus more narrowly on “personal liberties and free markets”, leading to the departure of respected opinion editor David Shipley.
When he took the role, Lewis was almost immediately faced with questions from the US media over his career as a senior executive at Murdoch’s media empire. He was also asked whether he had been involved in an alleged cover-up of phone hacking at the News of the World more than a decade earlier, which he has always denied.
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