Will Lewis is out as CEO and publisher of The Washington Post. Lewis announced his departure Saturday in a memo to staff, writing that "now is the right time for me to step aside" after what he described as "two years of transformation" at the paper.
Fox News reported that the transformation, it turns out, included cutting a third of the entire workforce — and then skipping town while someone else delivered the news.
Jeff D'Onofrio, who joined the paper in June 2025 as chief financial officer, has been named acting CEO and publisher effective immediately.
The sequence of events tells you everything about how this unraveled. On Wednesday, The Washington Post announced sweeping layoffs that impacted a third of all employees. Executive editor Matt Murray was tasked with delivering the news. Lewis and owner Jeff Bezos drew intense backlash for appearing absent during the announcement.
By Thursday, Lewis was spotted at a pre-Super Bowl event in San Francisco.
By Saturday, he was gone.
Whatever strategic logic existed behind the layoffs — and there may well have been some — the optics were a masterclass in how not to lead through a crisis. You don't hand your editor the knife and then show up at a party in San Francisco. That's not delegation. That's desertion.
Lewis had been blunt about the Post's trajectory from the start. During a June 2024 meeting, he laid it out for the newsroom:
"We are going to turn this thing around, but let's not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can't sugarcoat it anymore."
Give Lewis credit for the diagnosis. The Post's audience had collapsed, revenue was cratering, and the newsroom had grown accustomed to Bezos's deep pockets subsidizing a product fewer and fewer people wanted. That's a real problem, and someone had to say it.
But diagnosing the disease and treating it are two different things. Two years later, the treatment amounted to mass layoffs Lewis couldn't be bothered to announce himself — and a resignation memo full of polished corporate gratitude.
In a statement, Bezos called the Post "an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity," adding that readers "give us a roadmap to success" and that D'Onofrio, Murray, and opinion editor Adam O'Neal "are positioned to lead The Post into an exciting and thriving next chapter."
Murray, in an interview with Fox News Digital, pointed to an exchange between Bezos and the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin in December 2024:
"The first time I heard the words 'Save the Post' used, it was from the mouth of Jeff Bezos."
Murray went on to defend Lewis's engagement behind the scenes:
"Will has been engaged with me very closely on this for a long time... He had a lot of things to tend to today."
What those things were, Murray did not say. The defense is thin — and telling. When your executive editor has to explain to the press that the outgoing CEO was actually paying attention, the narrative is already written.
Here's the deeper question the Post's remaining staff should be asking: Save it for whom?
Murray framed the mission optimistically, saying everyone shares "the common desire for a thriving Post that's growing again, that's on sounder financial footing and in a good position to become more relevant to people's lives."
That sounds reasonable enough. But the Post didn't lose half its audience because of a formatting problem or a paywall miscalculation. It lost readers because large swaths of the American public stopped trusting it.
Lewis, in his departure memo, said difficult decisions were taken "so it can for many years ahead publish high-quality nonpartisan news to millions of customers each day." The word "nonpartisan" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The Post spent years positioning itself as the resistance press — and now wonders why half the country tuned out.
D'Onofrio, the new man in charge, struck a reverent tone in a press release:
"The Post's resolute commitment to writing the first rough draft of history anchors and imprints its future."
That's a nice sentiment. But the rough draft the Post has been writing for the last several years read less like history and more like advocacy. If D'Onofrio wants to chart a real future for the institution, the product itself — not just the balance sheet — needs the overhaul.
Washington Post staffers had previously spoken about Lewis's lack of presence in the newsroom. The layoffs confirmed what many already suspected: leadership was disconnected from the people doing the work. That's a management failure, and Lewis paid for it with his job.
But the larger failure predates Lewis entirely. The Post's audience didn't halve because of one CEO's missteps. It halved because the paper decided it knew better than its readers — what they should care about, how they should think, which stories mattered and which didn't. The audience responded the way audiences always do. They left.
A third of the Post's employees are now paying the price for that institutional arrogance. Lewis is gone. Bezos is issuing statements about "exciting next chapters."
And somewhere in the wreckage, a few hundred people just lost their jobs because the people running the paper couldn't figure out that contempt for your audience is not a business model.
