This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
The Washington Post’s incoming CEO Will Lewis made his first public appearance before Post staffers in an all-hands meeting on Monday just days after he was announced as Fred Ryan’s successor. Speaking from the center of the newsroom, internally dubbed “the Hub,” alongside interim CEO Patty Stonesifer, executive editor Sally Buzbee, and editorial page editor David Shipley, Lewis introduced himself to the editorial and business teams and laid out his journalistic bonafides, including how he missed working in news (“I so wish I was a journalist,” he said). One thing he promised not to do was lay out a strategic plan for the paper until he better learned the business, so as to avoid ending up in the foot-in-mouth situation Stonesifer found herself in when she announced company-wide buyouts last month. “Please don’t take anything I say today as an action,” Lewis said in the meeting, sources relayed to Confider, later telling staffers that if they were looking for a well-constructed plan from him during the all-hands, “you’re going to be disappointed, not going to happen.” Lewis seemed to charm staffers, many of whom laughed at his various jokes and pressed him on issues ranging from how he would work with the Post’s business side, his past employers’ various scandals, and his mandate from owner Jeff Bezos. “People found him likable,” a Post staffer told Confider after the meeting. Lewis also told the group that he was pro-union, a notable declaration as the Post Guild heads into its sixteenth month of contract negotiations. Lewis was announced as the Post’s next publisher late Saturday—minutes after the news was scooped by The New York Times.
