Last week, the Washington Post announced massive and immediate layoffs. It was one of the worst days in print media in a long time, with hundreds of journalists being fired effective immediately. WaPo’s sports section and book sections were decimated, as were all of the Post’s international bureaus. The Post literally fired war correspondents who were IN active warzones. Jeff Bezos purchased WaPo in 2013, and for a decade, he was seemingly an okay steward of one of the most important newspapers in the country. WaPo ran at a loss, but that loss was a drop in the bucket of Bezos’ enormous wealth. But something shifted in 2023, which is seemingly when Bezos decided that he wanted the Post to appeal to a different, more conservative readership. He brought in one of Rupert Murdoch’s henchmen, Will Lewis, as CEO/publisher. Lewis’s hire was the beginning of the end, with one catastrophic decision after another.
When the layoffs happened last week, people went back and forth about which man was more to blame, Will Lewis or Jeff Bezos. Why not both? Bezos clearly made the decision to throw himself face-first into MAGA politics, and Will Lewis was appointed by Bezos to take a sledgehammer to the Post. Lewis also pursued his own right-wing, Murdoch-adjacent agenda as well. To make matters worse for Lewis, he was in the wind last week when the layoffs were announced. He just disappeared, and he only reappeared publicly in California, where he was attending the pre-Super Bowl events. Well, wouldn’t you know, now Will Lewis is out. The media world is saying that Bezos fired him.
Sir Will Lewis, who was 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. Lewis came under fire for being absent when the deepest cuts at the paper in recent memory were announced, leaving editor-in-chief Matt Murray to explain the lay-offs 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 scale back The Post’s operations, shutting down entire teams such as its respected sports desk to focus on politics and security.
Senior management at The Post were livid when they discovered Lewis was attending Super Bowl-related festivities in San Francisco around the time of the news of the job cuts. It came off as “callous”, said one person in the newsroom familiar with the situation, adding that “the Super Bowl thing was the last straw”. “Bezos lost patience after the Super Bowl thing,” the person added.
Bezos said in a statement on Saturday The Post “has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity”. D’Onofrio, along with editor-in-chief 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 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 newsroom figure 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.”
Before 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 Wall Street Journal. Lewis was brought in to revive The Post’s fortunes. Instead, hundreds of thousands of readers deserted the title after he imposed a series of poorly received restructuring efforts.
I hope American print media takes heed of this debacle, especially the owners and publishers of American media outlets: stop hiring these rancid Fleet Street douchebags, they’re bringing their sleazy, asinine, royalist, criminal, self-dealing ways over here and destroying American outlets from within. British journalists and editors simply do not play by the same set of rules and we’ve seen time and time again that their lack of journalistic integrity doesn’t translate. I hope Will Lewis scurries back to Fleet Street and is seen no more.
Will Lewis was too busy to join the call to tell his staff he’s destroying the @washingtonpost sports department yesterday … but he did have time to walk the red carpet at NFL Honors here in San Francisco today. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/mnCXa8IQqC
— Nicki Jhabvala (@NickiJhabvala) February 6, 2026
Photos courtesy of Getty.
He knew he couldn’t stay on. I won’t be surprised if he’s back at the Telegraph by the end of the year.
Murdock is running a newspaper/tabloid in LA, Post, maybe he will hire this douchebag to run it.
Notice how they are trying to focus on the Opinion section, because that is what newspapers have become, opinion articles pretending to be “news”. I don’t need 15 opinion pieces a day, I need accurate accounting of what is happening in the country and the world. God forbid you just write an article with the who, what and when’s.
Bye bye bye. Good. See ya.
What a waste. The damage is done.
You know, the crazy thing about the UK is how brilliant the journalism is when it’s the real thing. I read the FT every day. Every single day. With religious devotion. Have done for years. Ditto the Economist, since 2000 or so, Spectator, at least ten years, weekly, avidly, they have columnists who are problematic but they have others who are brilliant who more than make up for them. Rory Sutherland is worth about ten thousand Delingpoles and ten million Liddles. But. I have not touched the DM in years, never have read the Sun and will only cruise the Independent once in a blue moon. They have no equivalent paper to the NYT — just a standard-issue, bread-and-butter, factual daily summary — if you don’t count the BBC, which is tv. It’s like something Jon Oliver said once, that for Americans, British people are either Prince Charles (or Colin Firth) or, the guy with a shaved head and a hoodie, shouting, “OI, MATE!” at a football match. Highbrow, lowbrow. Sadly, the lowbrow angle appeals to the overwhelming majority of the population. The Telegraph is comically philistine and provincial, and also, failing financially. They can’t go lower if they try. Which goes to show you: if it doesn’t pay to put out propaganda, just stick with a smaller audience who will pay for actual journalism. Egads.
The Guardian is pretty good. As is the Scottish-based Herald. Plenty of interesting analysis. BBC Radio 4 Sounds is also a treasure trove of great current stories and documentaries.
Good riddance to bad rubbish! Also, in these photos he looks as though he’s just off a three day bender — not sure if he always looks that way, or perhaps it’s just excellent image choices by Kaiser!
Steve Bannon tribute act.
LOLs
—But, also: what is Bezos doing?
Well, he’s taken the long-venerated Washington Post from being a paper of record to dwindling into a husk of its former fact-focused greatness, and he’s abruptly closed all of his Amazon Fresh grocery stores — which, at least in my neighborhood, were the lower priced option. I’d say Bezos is capriciously making choices that will leave many communities hungrier and more ignorant in his quests to monopolize more market sectors. What a guy!
Trying to torpedo independent journalism. If it weren’t already mostly dead, the GOP wants to make it really, truly dead. Bezos is one of the many tentacles of the GOP.
Surprise surprise the corrupt CEO hired for his sycophancy has no actual leadership skills or even a sense of basic human decency. FAFO Mr. Lewis. (Which also now stands for Forever Against Fascism Organization, doing powerful work organizing marches) Stay strong everyone I’m still a little misty-eyed thinking of the joyfully powerful message of community Bad Bunny shared last night.
Oh please – Bezos can try and throw Lewis out as a sacrificial lamb all he wants, but he did exactly what he was hired to do in exactly the way Bezos wanted. I am sure he will enjoy an excellent compensation package for overseeing the gutting of the Post and no limits on his future opportunities. These dudes always manage to fail up, don’t they?