The New Yorker digs into the turmoil at The Washington Post

New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone has a new piece out this morning asking if Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos is “selling out” The Washington Post.

Yes, Bezos ended the Washington Post’s endorsement tradition & is changing the Opinion pages, but there’s more to what’s going on with him, and to what’s happening inside one of the country’s most important news organizations.

My story:

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202…

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— Clare Malone (@claremalone.bsky.social) May 12, 2025 at 9:51 AM

Neither Bezos nor his controversial pick for CEO, Will Lewis, agreed to speak and no one in the article could say for sure what Bezos’ vision for the Post might be. (I have no earthly idea what this quote from the piece, for example, might mean for the one of the most esteemed and respected news organizations in the country: “A journalist who knows Bezos said, ‘He’s on an intellectual journey. Wherever he lands, he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it’s a mind at work.’”) Still, Malone summarizes and contextualizes the recent controversies that have beset the Post and uncovers new nuggets along the way.

Anyone who has been paying even half attention has noticed Washington Post staff — especially high-profile reporters — have been leaving left and right. (“Those who could find work elsewhere left,” as Malone puts it.) The print headline for Malone’s piece is “All the Billionaire’s Men.” The callback to the Post’s most famous chapter does double duty as the timeline Malone lays out has remarkably few women in it:

“The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies,” Ashley Parker, one of the paper’s White House correspondents, told Lewis. “And now we have four white men running three newsrooms.” (Parker later left the Post, along with several others, for The Atlantic.) Caroline Kitchener, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, pressed Lewis about whether he had interviewed any women or people of color for the job. Lewis erupted. “If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, you can feel free to leave,” he said. (Kitchener now works at the Times.)

Bezos has become a more public figure (and a far buffer one) in the years since he purchased the Post in 2013. In the intervening years, the paper also lost a significant amount of money and subscribers — including 300,000 subscribers lost in the first year of Biden’s presidency. Bezos has been credited with taking a hands-off approach to the newsroom (in contrast to the Post’s opinion section) but sources in Malone’s piece seem mixed over whether Bezos should take a more active role in steering the business of the legacy newspaper:

For years, most of Bezos’s ideas for the Post seemed based on his experience at Amazon. “He said, ‘I’d rather have two hundred million subscribers paying ten dollars a year than a smaller number paying a higher price,’” another former editor told me. “Just supersize the number. That was always his idea of a really successful digital news organization.” But, at a time when mainstream media outlets are widely distrusted, the number of people who want to pay for quality news in America is distinctly smaller than the number of those who want to order two-ply toilet paper that will arrive the next day.
“For such a smart, accomplished guy, who has owned the business for as long as he has,” one person who’s had conversations with Bezos about the paper said, “he is too timid about the operating levers he can pull and too ambitious about the commercial reach of the paper.”

Bezos reportedly told newsroom leaders he wanted to Post to “widen its aperture” and opened up the app of The Atlantic to illustrate his point. Bezos also reportedly said he “thought more firefighters from Nebraska should be reading the Post.” One source told Malone: “It was almost like someone who descended from another world.”

The Washington Post has declared a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of two hundred million paid users, including from subscriptions, a new “friction-less” flexible payment system, and “distribution partnerships.”

Many of the journalists Malone spoke to were disenchanted with Washington Post CEO Will Lewis. It was widely reported when Lewis told the Post staff last year, “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.” Malone reports that Post journalists described the “moment as a mask falling away.” (“It’s when I would say everybody started communicating with each other on Signal, rather than Slack,” one former editor told Malone.)

Lewis has also damaged his standing with staff by “drinking heavily in social settings,” according to the piece. Malone also chronicles a pattern of Lewis isolating himself — issuing last-minute cancellations to important events and repeatedly going into “a state of hiding.” The relationship between Lewis and the newsroom remains strained:

One person who has had conversations with the Post’s leadership said that Lewis and his top deputies now speak of the newsroom with “vitriol.” “They were constantly infantilizing them and constantly talking about how they needed to be disciplined,” the person said. (A spokesperson for the Post denied this, saying that Lewis has “tremendous respect and appreciation for his colleagues.”) In exit interviews, meanwhile, staff members have attributed their departures to Lewis’s lack of a discernible plan for the paper. “The idea that the newsroom is the reason for the Post’s struggles is unfair,” one former top editor said. “The newsroom is not always its own best friend, but Will somehow convinced Jeff that it is the problem, when really there is no business strategy.”

Bezos recently announced the opinion section would focus on “free markets and personal liberties.” It’s unclear what, exactly, that will look like but Malone reveals in her piece that Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez are both “devoted readers” of the “anti-woke” media company Free Press. Free Press columnist Matthew Continetti is rumored to be in the running to become the Post’s next opinion editor, Malone reports. (His latest column ran under the headline “The Wisdom of The Donald.”)

Bezos was recently asked how he planned to fix the Post:

“I have a bunch of ideas, and I’m working on that right now,” he said. “So we’ll see. You know, we saved the Washington Post once. This will be the second time.”

Read the full piece here.