Weeks before the embattled Washington Post editor-in-chief suddenly resigned on Sunday, her relationship with the company’s chief executive became increasingly strained.
In mid-May, the two argued over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal that had ties to the Post’s chief executive, Will Lewis, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.
Sally Buzbee, the editor, told Mr. Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s planned decision in a long-running British legal battle brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, the people said.
As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’ name to a list of executives they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking of the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee that the case involving him did not merit news coverage, the people said.
When Ms. Buzbee said the Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision was a misjudgment and abruptly ended the conversation.
The interaction shocked Ms. Buzbee, who then consulted with confidants outside The Post about how to handle the situation. When the judge ruled a few days later, on May 21, that Mr. Lewis could be included in the case, The Post published an article about the decision.
Mr Lewis did not prevent the article from being published. But the incident continued to weigh on Ms. Buzbee as she considered her future at the newspaper, according to the two people with knowledge of her decision-making process. Her ultimate decision to resign has rocked one of the country’s leading news organizations.
The dispute over the court ruling was not the main reason for her resignation. Ms. Buzbee had already been considering her future at The Post because Mr. Lewis presented her with a plan to reorganize the newsroom in April, the people said. According to the people, Mr. Lewis had offered Ms. Buzbee a job heading a new department focused on social media and service journalism. She viewed this as a demotion because her job as editor-in-chief included overseeing all parts of the news report.
A spokeswoman for The Post declined to comment. Ms. Buzbee also declined to comment.
Mr. Lewis was hired late last year by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and Amazon founder, to revamp the publication as it suffered from steep declines in audience and annual losses in the tens of millions of dollars. In recent months, Mr. Lewis, who was previously chairman of News Corp’s Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has formulated a strategy to overhaul the company.
He decided to divide the newsroom into three departments: a central newsroom covering politics, economics and other topics; an opinion section; and a new division that would focus on social media such as video storytelling as well as service journalism including wellness and lifestyle reporting. (The post is currently divided into two parts: News and Opinion.)
When Mr. Lewis offered Ms. Buzbee a job as head of social media and service journalism, he told her that she could help hire an editor to oversee the main news division, according to people familiar with her thinking. He later told her that he had chosen Robert Winnett, an editor at the Daily Telegraph who had previously worked with Mr. Lewis, the people said.
The conversation between Mr. Lewis and Ms. Buzbee about reporting on phone hackers took place in a conference room at a board meeting outside the Post newsroom. At the meeting, Postal Service executives discussed Mr. Lewis’ planned changes to the Postal Service.
Occasionally, editors alert top managers to sensitive stories before they are published. In 2013, Martin Baron, the longtime editor before Ms. Buzbee, informed the Post’s editor, Katharine Weymouth, before the Post began reporting sensitive stories about the National Security Agency. In 1971, Ben Bradlee, a dedicated editor-in-chief, informed Katharine Graham, the Post’s former owner, before the newspaper published articles about the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the secret history of the Vietnam War.
Mr. Lewis declined to comment to The Post for his article about the verdict in the phone hacking case. However, in numerous previous media interviews he has strongly denied allegations that he was involved in a cover-up of phone hacking when he was a senior executive to Mr Murdoch. The Post published an article about the lawsuit in March that also named Mr. Lewis.
At a contentious staff meeting on Monday, Mr. Lewis defended his business strategy, telling the newsroom that The Post lost $77 million last year, had seen a 50 percent decline in viewership since 2020 and needed to make radical changes to succeed.
“Let’s not sugarcoat it. “It has to be turned around, right?” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “We are losing large amounts of money. Their audience has halved in recent years. People don’t read your stuff.”
He continued, “I needed to take urgent action to put us on a different path and find talent that I’ve worked with that are some of the best of the best of the best.”
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2024-06-06 00:59:20
www.nytimes.com
