Updated-A focus on the Washington Post ruckus/fracas/SNAFU/storm in a tea cup
As forecast in my last update the revamp of people and products at the Washington Post under new CEO William Lewis has merged into the fracas over his role in defending News Corp from hacking claims
UPDATED - Will Lewis, the new CEO and publisher of the Washington Post, is undoubtedly determined to “move fast and break things” at the venerable and arguably sclerotic news organisation bought in an act of influencer charity by Jeff Bezos a decade ago.
The speed of change is impressive but execution is dogged by the fallout from important personnel changes in which he has brought in old allies. Then there are fresh questions over his work to help Rupert Murdoch solve the phone-hacking crisis.
[I have slightly updated this article to fix a typo and add some of the fast-moving developments and claims, including Will Lewis’ latest remarks to staff promising humility.]
A restive newsroom and bone-picking American media writers also raise questions over reporting methods behind his greatest editorial success as editor of The Daily Telegraph in which the Telegraph paid for leaked material on politicians. (Ironically, it is widely believed in Fleet Street that the then-editor of Murdoch’s Times declined to pay, effectively handing the story to The Telegraph.)
Prickly
Will took me to task for the post last week for raising the hacking story as a factor that could get in the way of revitalising one of the great brands in media. I saw it as a statement of the obvious that the hacking clean-up story would resurface given new court evidence reported in the UK and that it would combine with the challenges at The Post to create an even more difficult climate in which to rescue the Post.
[Turns out he took the far more important NPR media reporter David Folkenflik to tasks and most recently described him as an “activist” rather than a journalist. That is most unfortunate given Folkenflik’s reputation for reliability and fairmindedness.]
Link to Lionel tweet.
Given the ruckus at the Post this week with its executive editor Sally Buzbee gone overnight, obvious staff resistance to his plans for a radical reshaping of editorial, and questions asked over two big editorial leader choices (both his former colleagues), it was inevitable that more would emerge about the legacy of the hacking affair at News.
[Jack Schafer, the acerbic media commentator from Politico makes these points and more in his amusing and searing column on the fiasco, writing: ‘He can’t very well put out the business fire that is consuming the Washington Post (it has lost $77 million in the past year) if his own pants are aflame…’.and concludes…’If he hopes to succeed, he must perform a reverse ferret of a sort and level with his reporters and the press. Nobody wants to work for an untrustworthy publisher.’]
Will was instrumental in making the problem go away for Rupert Murdoch. It was messy, and ugly, and led to many journalists being drawn into the police investigation. It was also, until now, largely hidden because so many court cases were settled out of court meaning a huge body of claims submitted in evidence were never aired or tested in court. Like it or not it is news that the CEO of The Washington Post gets named in a case brought by Prince Harry as part of an ongoing series of cases that has already cost News Corp more than a billion dollars in out-of-court settlements.
Will has said he decided long ago never to discuss his work in that period.
If it is correct that at least part of Buzbee’s exit was to do with her feeling pressure from Will not to pursue what was ultimately a sensible and straight story on the links drawn between Lewis and the fallout from hacking, then you have exactly the correlation I expected to happen between that legacy and his his attempts to revamp the Post. [Fixed typo in there to insert ‘between that legacy.’]
The fact Lewis announced former Wall Street Journal editor Matt Murray as at least her stand-in and, more significantly to Post staff, his old Telegraph and Sunday Times chum Robert Winnett, as the future editor of the Post newsroom, unsettled staff.
I will offer links below to what I think are the most important reads and listens I’ve found on this so far. Let me first share some thoughts (based on my experience and reading of the situation rather than any particular inside information) on the revamp at The Post, the staff decisions, and the sense of urgency Will exudes.
The three-newsroom strategy Lewis announced in a staff town hall — with no executive editor and all three editors (news, commentary, and a new service journalism team) reporting to him — means that Lewis is defacto editor-in-chief as well as publisher and CEO. It is a ground-breaking melding of editorial and commercial responsibilities but it is anathema to highfalutin or cherished ideas of “church and state” in US media. [The latest, very straight, piece from the Washington Post to me doesn’t get that Will is going to be EiC even if he doesn’t literally say it. The org chart implies it.]
The third newsroom idea makes sense as an internal ginger group to innovate and reach audiences the Post is weak in. It may help the Post retake ground lost to fast-moving competitors like Politico, Axios and Vox whose founders were at the Post but had to leave to innovate. It may also be worth looking at The News Movement which Will founded for ideas on reaching young audiences.
Matt Murray was a smart and probably inevitable choice to join that triumvirate perhaps with added momentum with Buzbee’s late-night Sunday departure. He was defenestrated at the WSJ when Lewis left as CEO of parent company Dow Jones. He is credible, American, and best of all available fast.
Will values scoops and was himself a scoopmeister. Winnett is cut from the same cloth. I suspect his appointment is about creating a culture of breaking stories regardless of any lack of experience in the United States. The Post has arguablybeen soundly beaten on Washington stories by Axios and the New York Times, especially Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman on the Trump beat.
There was an unfortunate and yet I suspect deliberate choice of words from Lewis in a boisterous session with the newsroom on Monday after the Buzbee departure. He told the newsroom “your” audience had halved (rather than the more sensitive “our” and “People are not reading your stuff.” He was making a point that change is essential and he wouldn’t “sugar-coat it”.
Change is hard in any organisation but in my — bruising — experience in newsrooms, especially in the United States, there are few workplaces where staff are as invested in themselves and what they consider their mission (sometimes but not always aligned to the organisation). An episode of the podcast Media Confidential made the point that former Post executive editor Marty Baron had “lost the newsroom” when blindsided by a rise of activism among staff.
Will is a director of the Associated Press and must have known Sally Buzbee well in her previous role as executive editor. I have no doubt he considered her a pro as he said in his valedictory message which commentators noted had no equivalent comment from her. However, it is a big shift from running a global news agency to a commercial news organisation fighting for its survival against agile competitors and the New York Times which is devouring the “quality” space. (AP is also the primary partner of The News Movement for Gen-Z audiences.)
Standby for shifts in technology at the Post. One of its real innovations, years before Bezos, was creating the Arc content management system and turning it into a business to offer to other publishers. It did the same with its Zeus advertising platform which it retracted into an in-house service. In a sense, Arc and Zeus are tiny equivalents to the big decision Bezos took at Amazon to launch the company’s own cloud platform as Amazon Web Services. Expect change.
Updated: Recommended reading and listening on this topic
Clash Over Phone Hacking Article Preceded Exit of Washington Post Editor is a measured take by the New York Times media reporter but as you will see if you read it (and I am using this to give the Lewis view) his spokesperson has other ideas.
If the Washington Post is to fly again, its journalists must share the cockpit, in The Guardian by former Washington Post media commentator and former New York Times ombudsman/public editor gives a view of the newsroom attitude.
“I Can’t Sugarcoat It Anymore”: Will Lewis Bluntly Defends Washington Post Shake-Up - a fair but possibly dated view from Vanity Fair from earlier this week which did a good job, helpfully to Lewis, of explaining the need for “decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path.”
The Rebooting Show: The Washington Post’s Turnaround Plan - a thoughtful podcast assessment of the truly important commercial and product implications of the Post revamp rather than the usual media pile-on.
'Washington Post' publisher tried to kill a story about him. It wasn’t the first time - from NPR’s media reporter David Folkenflik who has done a great job covering the ructions in his own organisation and clearly sees a sacred mission for media.
[New]Media Confidential podcast with former Guardian and now Prospect editor Alan Rusbridger and former FT editor Lionel Barber is perhaps the most thoughtful analysis both of this crisis, Will’s background, and history. Also really good intervention in it with David Folkenflik. Alan, absolutely rightly at the end, reminds us of Will’s short-lived attempt at a media incubator The Euston Project.
[New] The Spectacle of Impunity: Phone-Hacking Cover-Up Claims Cross the Atlantic, a comprehensive explanation of how we got here by a brave journalist who was more or less the only permanent presence at the Leveson Inquiry.
[New] Prospect Magazine investigation into previously unreported or underreported evidence posted in court documents related to the original hacking cases, the clean-up operation inside News UK led by Will and colleagues, and the fresh and maybe ultimately most damaging claims of evidence destruction and corporate espionage. This is the reservoir that needs to be read in full to understand the story beyond the he said/we said stories or self-serving American fears of hard-charging Brit journos.
[New] Anger mounts at Washington Post over leadership changes and CEO’s record - a not bad and free-to-access piece in The Guardian pulling many threads together without any great revelation of reporting but worthwhile reading.
[I know this can seem rather inside baseball and of interest mainly to media people but that is mostly who subscribes to my Substack. If I feel it necessary I will do a fresh entry rather than update this one again. Thanks for your interest.]
ENDS/pgb
Fantastic summary and insight Peter. Cheers.
Peter, the fact that he reached out to you to raise the issue about your last newlsetter and also has been reported to have tried to pressure NPR's media reporter not to cover that in exchange for an exclusive is Sunak-ian in terms of bad optics. He doesn't have the same relationships in Washington that he had in London, and the print journalism culture is very, very different than the UK. Taking cheap pot shots at David Folkenflik at NPR by calling him an activist is only going to make it worse. David is well-respected and attacking him will only deepen the perception that Lewis' soul belongs to Murdoch not to the Fourth Estate. Somebody needs to take Lewis's shovel away. Yes, transformation and culture change is difficult, but this is an own goal. He can't say that he respects the church-state divide while policing his image this aggressively, and that's naught to do with business transformation. He looks and acts like a man with a container ship full of skeletons to hide, and that is blood in the water to any journalist.