When Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post in January 2024, he was received as a potential redeemer. The Post had lost $77 million the previous year under Lewis’s predecessor as publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, an affable man about town who was once Ronald Reagan’s post-presidential chief of staff. “The state of the paper when Fred left was really bad,” says a senior staffer on the business side. “It was basically like two generational news cycles of Trump and COVID made the execs feel like they had a strategy and then the music stopped and subscribers fell away.” From its high of 3 million subscribers at the end of the first Trump administration, the Post was now down to 2.5 million, and half of its online audience had withered away from a peak in 2020. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, was looking for a leader to jolt the paper to life.

“He came in, and we were all onboard — It’s exciting; we need a refreshing change,” recalls a former senior newsroom staffer. Lewis had a certain swagger and a British accent. In those early months, he told Puck that it was time for the paper to reassert itself among the slew of competitors — Politico, Axios, Punchbowl News — that had crowded the Washington, D.C., media marketplace. “We’ve let the tanks come onto our lawn,” Lewis said. “We’ve let people invade our space, and it’s time to push back.” A former editor describes his arrival as “a relief after years of Fred’s French-cuffed leadership.”

“Will’s entry was actually really impressive,” a former Post executive tells me. “The Post gave away the paper for free to anyone with a .gov email address. A lot of things were incredibly frustrating in that era. Will came in and saw that right away.” Former executive editor Marty Baron had expanded the newsroom during the Trump bump, and his successor, Sally Buzbee, had hired around another 150 journalists, but it wasn’t clear how that newsroom muscle would be used to make money. “I guess they just assumed they’d get more advertising and traffic and subs, but that’s not the strategy that worked,” a business-side executive tells me. “The New York Times is succeeding because it has multiple revenue streams.”

Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who had edited Britain’s The Telegraph for three years and was publisher of The Wall Street Journal for six years, seemed to grasp the need for adopting a creative new business model while remaining respectful of the Post’s core journalistic mission. His first meeting with the newsroom, a couple months before he officially took the helm, came shortly after the company bought out 240 employees. “We’re not in a place that we want to be in, and we need to get to that place as fast as we can,” Lewis said in November 2023. He also assured the assembled journalists, “We’re not going to do it by cutting; we’re going to do it by growing.”

“At the outset, there wasn’t a lot of reason to dislike him,” recalls one current Post staffer. Every day he was firing off emails to reporters to compliment their coverage and making an effort to get to know them, which people appreciated. “He spent time with reporters at the holiday party,” the staffer says. “He was drinking low-end beer and relishing it and had this sort of Everyman approach.” One former business-side staffer remembers how Lewis “was charismatic, very high energy in a slightly manic way. While you’re talking to him, you can get a little swept up, and then afterward, if you try to recount what he said, you realize lots of words don’t really add up.”

It took less than six months for his relationship with the newsroom to fall apart. He was appalled that Post journalists were investigating accusations that he had helped Murdoch’s media empire cover up its involvement in Britain’s long-running phone-hacking scandal — accusations that he had denied. “That created basically a permanent wound,” the current staffer says. Lewis pushed out Buzbee and replaced her with Telegraph editor Robert Winnett — who quickly had to withdraw in response to reports about his involvement in the hacking scandal. Lewis then tapped Matt Murray, who had worked with him at the Journal, to be executive editor.

In a now-infamous town hall that June, journalists peppered Lewis with aggressive questions. “He suddenly flipped a switch,” recalls another current staffer. He was “slouched in a chair and looking disheveled,” snapping at decorated journalists, “People are not reading your stuff.”

“He had two settings: charming Brit and asshole Brit. And he quickly moved into the latter category,” a former Post staffer tells me. “He was just like, ‘Fuck the feelings of the newsroom,’” an executive at a rival media organization says. “He was just going to plow through and get his job done for his boss.”

The problem for Lewis, who did not respond to a request for an interview, is that he couldn’t do that, either. According to former and current Post employees on both the editorial and the business ends of the operation — who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation or losing their severance — Lewis became an isolated figure at the company over the next year and a half, adrift from the newsroom and its operations and unable to get other projects up and running. He ultimately became estranged from Bezos, who compounded Lewis’s problems by pulling the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, leading hundreds of thousands of outraged readers to cancel their subscriptions. In the fall of 2025, Bezos rejected Lewis’s latest proposals to shore up the company’s finances, the problem being Lewis’s plan “was not based on any data,” says a senior editor. “Bezos was like, ‘Well, why are you doing this?’ And I think there were no good answers.” Bezos, who did not respond to a request for comment, sent him back to the drawing board.

To no avail. By early February this year, Lewis was overseeing at least 300 job cuts, by some estimates nearly half the newsroom, and the same week was forced out by Bezos for his troubles, days after Lewis was spotted walking the red carpet at a........

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