The Rupert Murdoch-ization of the Washington Post

Like the owner’s manual that sends you searching YouTube for additional and useable instructions, Washington Post Publisher and CEO Sir William Lewis’ 900-word memo to his staff, emailed Sunday night, perplexes more than it enlightens.

The headline news, of course, is simple enough: Lewis showed the door to Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, installed just three years ago by previous publisher Fred Ryan, who left last year after a bit of turbulence of his own. In her place, Lewis recruited two long-time former colleagues to actually produce the paper, Matt Murray and by year’s end, Robert Winnett.

Beyond that, the Lewis memo fails to illuminate the paper’s new path. Like all reorg charts, the Lewis memo makes about as much intuitive sense as a football play diagrammed on a whiteboard, all arrows and O’s and X’s, and it over-indulges in the standard corporate-speak about “urgency” and the need for “transparency” every new regime peddles. Lewis didn’t even answer questions from his own reporters for its Monday news story about the shake-up.

But it doesn’t take much in the way of divination to predict that the team Lewis has assembled will Wall Street Journal-ify and Rupert Murdoch-ize the Washington Post, and that the remodeled newspaper will be guided by British attitude and experience. This transformation was quietly beginning even before Sunday night. After Lewis came on earlier this year, he hired fellow countrymen Suzi Watford as its chief strategy officer and Karl Wells as its chief growth officer. (Winnett is a Brit, too.) Murray, Watford, Winnett and Wells have all worked at the Journal or at the U.K. Telegraph, overlapping with Lewis, who has held top spots at those places. Lewis once hired Winnett at the Telegraph, making the new team a bit of a fractured family reunion. Murray came to the Journal in 1994 and rose to editor-in-chief in 2018 before being replaced in 2023.

What will it all mean for the Post? You may be surprised.

Based on the lengthy track record of Lewis’ new lieutenants, look for the paper to abandon the flabby storytelling that plagues most of its A-section stories. In addition to shorter articles, be on the lookout for spicier headlines that bring a sharper, intelligent approach to newspapering Murdoch applied to the Wall Street Journal, akin to what the Financial Times does. Out will be the endless narratives that have the “gestation period of a llama,” the famous slam directed at the Journal by Robert Thomson in 2008 when he took over that paper for Murdoch. In will be stories that get directly to the point and then exit.

These are big changes Lewis has made, but will they suffice to improve the paper’s condition? “I know Matt Murray and think a lot of him as an editor and a human being; I do not know the others involved — Lewis, Winnett. But based on the track records of these folks’ prior work together, these picks seem to yield perhaps a loyal team, but not one I would have thought likely to drive big innovation,” says Dick Tofel, former assistant publisher of the Journal and former president of ProPublica.

(The Lewis regime will be clouded in the interim by a complex British lawsuit that links him but does not charge him with playing some role in covering up evidence in the now-distant phone hacking scandal. See NPR reporter David Folkenflik’s account, reporting from the Daily Beast, a British Prospect piece, and a mention in a recent Washington Post article for more information. Be prepared to be confused. Lewis has denied wrongdoing.)

Many observers (including your narrator) predicted that Murdoch would apply his reverse-Midas touch to the Wall Street Journal with his tabloid ways and destroy one of America’s great newspapers when he bought it from the Bancroft family back in 2007. But he proved us wrong as he merely changed the paper into a tighter read, and edited it more for a general audience than a pure business one.

One might be tempted to speculate that the new, Brit-heavy, Murdoch-pedigreed leadership will turn the Post into a fiery right-wing tablet. But douse that thought with flame retardant. None of the new Lewis crew seem to tilt that way, not even Murray when he ran the news pages of the Journal, the paper that broke the Trump-wounding Stormy Daniels story in 2018.

Still, the regime got a bad review Monday morning at a staff meeting Lewis and Murray held at the Post. In exchanges that were described to me as heated by people present, staffers wanted to know why Lewis had recruited all his old buddies and why a greater search for new leadership had not been conducted to interview women or non-white people. Lewis stood his ground and indicated that the flight manifest had been filed and no major alterations would be forthcoming.

The meeting might have marked one of the few occasions that something resembling public sympathy had been generated for Buzbee. Never popular with the Post staff and given to speaking in pillowy generalities like a politician, Buzbee was frequently characterized, unfairly, perhaps, by staffers as being only slightly aware of what her paper published.

The newsroom changes put in place by Lewis will not be immediate. Murray will run the Post until after the election, at which point he’ll hand off to Winnett, who will be in charge of what Lewis calls the “core coverage areas,” defined by him as “politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.” Murray will then run the new third newsroom.

The invisible hand in all this, of course, is Post owner Jeff Bezos, who steers his empire based on the six-page memos his executives write for him. It’s likely that the Lewis plan to split the newsroom into a “core” and a third newsroom was incubated in such a document. Bezos, after all, is covering the papers’ losses, which the Post reports hit $77 million over the last year. By inaugurating a new editorial and publishing regime, Bezos has reloaded the chambers for the paper’s next volleys, be it a Wall Street Journal-inspired smart tabloid or something else. Looks like we’ll have the Washington Post to kick around a good bit longer.

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Only a xenophobe would object to the Britification of the Post. Send British lexicon and candies to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads long to be included in a six-page memo. My defunct RSS feed would only consent to edit the paper if it could bring back Kids’ Post.