Standing on the seventh floor in the center of the Washington Post’s open newsroom on the morning of 3 June 2024, publisher Will Lewis decided to deliver some tough love to a news organization he had taken charge of five months earlier.
Lewis, a veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, had replaced Fred Ryan, a former Ronald Reagan aide who had presided over some of the Post’s profitable years – during the first Trump administration – but lost the confidence of some staffers after clashing with employees during a late 2022 town hall.
“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it: it needs turning around, right?” Lewis said. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it any more. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path.”
Related: Washington Post publisher Will Lewis abruptly resigns amid criticism of staff cuts
It turned out to be one of the few times that Lewis would address the whole company. On Saturday evening, Lewis, 56, abruptly announced his resignation, just three days after the Post slashed nearly a third of its entire staff in one of the largest layoffs in US media history. Instead of putting the Post on a more promising financial path, Lewis’s two years were marked by controversy, clashes with staff and jargon-heavy initiatives that didn’t seem to amount to much.