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William Lewis, hired in 2023 by Jeff Bezos to turn around the Washington Post, is stepping down as chief executive and publisher after the company fired about 300 of its roughly 800 reporters this week.
“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 well-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”.
Lewis came under fire this week as he was absent during the layoffs announcement, leaving editor-in-chief Matt Murray to explain the rationale behind the bruising job cuts to both staff and the media.
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”.
“There was no communication from him about buyouts. He didn’t put out a statement. Senior editorial leadership was furious.”
Bezos, in a statement on Saturday, said the Post “has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity”.
“Jeff, along with Matt and Adam, are positioned to lead The Post into an exciting and thriving next chapter.” Bezos did not mention Lewis in his statement.
Lewis did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
Prior to joining the Post, Lewis had held several high-profile jobs in the media industry, including editor of the Daily Telegraph, a senior editor at the Financial Times and publisher of the Rupert Murdoch-owned 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.
However, it was editorial decisions such as preventing the newspaper from endorsing a US presidential candidate in the 2024 election that caused the most upset among staff and readers. A reported 250,000 subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the Post pulled its endorsement for president ahead of the 2024 election.
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.
Lewis was almost immediately faced with questions when he took the role among the US media over his career as a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and whether he was involved in an alleged cover-up of phone hacking by the News of the World more than a decade ago. Lewis has always denied any wrongdoing.