Updated February 7, 2026 at 10:51 PM EST
The Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Will Lewis announced Saturday evening he would depart after just two years at the paper, a tenure marked by controversy and crisis.
Lewis called his time "two years of transformation" in his resignation note, but it was defined by turbulence rather than a clear path, and it ended with brutal job cuts. The paper's chief financial officer, Jeff D'Onofrio, will serve as acting CEO.
More than a third of the newsroom was laid off Wednesday after Lewis' promises of radical innovations failed to staunch several years of annual losses in the tens of millions of dollars. At one point, losses hit $100 million, Lewis told staffers in June 2024 during a rocky newsroom all-staff. The session occurred just five months into his time at the Post. Yet it proved to be his final all-staff meeting.
He was effectively AWOL as the paper's scope, ambitions and journalism were radically redefined and constricted. Lewis played no visible role in announcing the layoffs in a mandatory Zoom call for the newsroom on Wednesday. Nor did he publicly address the paper's readers to allay their concerns.
The coup de grâce came just a day later when Lewis was photographed in Northern California walking a red carpet at a Super Bowl event.
The newsroom had lost so much faith in Lewis that, in recent weeks, journalists appealed directly in letters to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the paper's owner, to spare the paper from cuts and help it find financial stability. Bezos did not respond to those appeals.
As NPR has previously reported, the sports desk was eliminated; the local news staff reduced to about a dozen from more than 40; the international desk decimated. Among the layoffs: the entire Middle East team, the Ukraine bureau chief and another war correspondent. The latter posted she received the email informing her of her job loss while she was in a war zone.
Executive Editor Matt Murray told staffers on Wednesday he hopes the paper will maintain a "presence" in 12 locations around the globe. Four people with knowledge of the still-evolving plans say that presence is likely to rely significantly on local stringers. (They declined to speak on the record as the precise details of who is to be retained had yet to be resolved.) Lewis, Murray and Bezos have declined comment about the layoffs through their spokespersons.
Murray told staffers the paper will focus on U.S. politics and national security as well as health, wellness, and other subjects in which readers have shown strong interest. The newsroom will stand at about 500 people.
Bezos promised an exciting and thriving next chapter for the paper in a statement issued by the company Saturday evening. It is his first public comment in some time.
"The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity," Bezos wrote. "Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus."
In the same press release, the new CEO paid homage to the newspaper's legacy.
"The Post's resolute commitment to writing the first rough draft of history anchors and imprints its future," said D'Onofrio, the new chief executive and publisher. "I am honored to become part of charting that future and to take the lead in securing both the legacy and business of this fierce, storied American institution."
"Something I will be most proud of"
Bezos, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, had been hailed as a savior when he bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013. The newspaper was falling into the same cycle of decline that had afflicted so many metro dailies.
And he said it would be a generational investment.
"My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I'm 90 and reviewing my life," Bezos wrote in 2019, when his personal life became the subject of tabloid fodder.
He invested deeply in the company and promised not to intervene in news coverage, despite his vast business interests. And, he never did — despite the fact that his vast business interests could be the subject of news reports — according to several current and former senior news executives, including Marty Baron. Baron, who led the paper to great heights in covering President Trump's first term, wrote in his memoir that the paper enjoyed six straight years of profits.
The approach came at a cost to Bezos: Trump, who often denounced the paper as the "Amazon Washington Post," took umbrage when Amazon was expected to land a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon. Microsoft won it again; Amazon sued, claiming Trump had interfered.
The case was ultimately settled after the Pentagon split the contract among four companies, including Amazon, but its take was far smaller.
The Post's profits turned to losses and Bezos's approach changed. When it became clear in summer 2023 that former Post Publisher Fred Ryan did not have the answers to growing red ink, Bezos forced him out.
Deft at handling conservative powerhouses
By that fall, Bezos had settled on Lewis, a Brit who had made his name in the hard-charging world of Fleet Street journalism.
As NPR has previously reported, Lewis proved attractive to Bezos on several grounds. Lewis had led the Wall Street Journal as publisher and chief executive for six years as it found strong financial footing with its paywall.
Lewis also knew how to handle outsized conservative personalities, having worked for media mogul Rupert Murdoch in both Britain and the U.S. and, later, serving as a consultant to then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
But a British scandal continued to dog Lewis.
As NPR reported just weeks before Lewis started at the Post, a group of plaintiffs suing Murdoch's British tabloids in London argued in court that Lewis was at the heart of a concerted effort to hide evidence of criminality at the papers. Lewis stood accused in the civil cases of seeking to protect Murdoch's top executives.
Lewis pressured NPR to drop the story, then offered an inducement: an exclusive one-on-one interview about his future plans for the paper.
After NPR published and broadcast its story, Lewis repeatedly warned the Post's executive editor at the time, Sally Buzbee, against letting her staff pursue the network's reporting about him. The Post nonetheless published significant reporting late the following spring.
Soon after, Lewis offered Buzbee a new position. She saw it as a demotion and left the newspaper. He hired an old friend from his British editing days for the top news job. But questions about their past conduct in London, as reported in NPR, the Post and the New York Times, torpedoed that appointment.
"Ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top"
That October, the paper prepared to publish an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Bezos killed the story just days before the November election. Trump won. Amazon gave $1 million toward Trump's inauguration costs; Bezos and his fiancee — now wife — sat on the dais behind Trump alongside other digital chieftains.
A few weeks after, in February 2025, Bezos ordered a change in the paper's editorial page to focus primarily on "personal liberties and free markets." The revamp matched Bezos' own inclinations. It was also less likely to yield criticism of Trump. The editorial page editor resigned.
Lewis was unable to talk Bezos out of the changes; as NPR first reported, subscribers fled the paper in droves. All told, there were more than 375,000 cancellations — a loss of 15% of the paper's digital subscribers in just a few months.
Post journalists asked Lewis and Bezos not to hold the resulting financial losses against the newsroom and opinion pages. Those pleas, like others that would follow, fell on deaf ears.
After hearing news of the layoffs Wednesday, Baron published a scathing statement. The Post's challenges, he said, "were made indefinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top."
Bezos has spoken affirmingly of Trump's return to power publicly. Most recently, he welcomed Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to his space company, Blue Origin. It has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. Bezos says his business interests do not affect his interest in the paper.
Post journalists rallied outside the paper's headquarters in Washington Thursday to protest the job cuts. In the leafy neighborhood of Georgetown, someone had taped a flyer to a post. It read, "WANTED FOR DESTROYING THE WASHINGTON POST," above a photo of Lewis.
Lewis curtly and cheerfully announced his departure in a note to staff late Saturday.
"All - after two years of transformation at The Washington Post, now is the right time for me to step aside," he wrote. Lewis said the paper could not have a better owner than Bezos.
He added: "During my tenure, difficult decisions have been taken in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post so it can for many years ahead publish high-quality nonpartisan news to millions of customers each day."
The note was headed: "No subject."
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