Will Lewis, publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, announced Saturday he is stepping down after two turbulent years marked by deep cuts and internal turmoil. Jeff D’Onofrio, the paper’s chief financial officer, will serve as acting CEO.
The departures follow a round of layoffs this week that affected more than a third of the newsroom as the company moved to trim losses. Lewis had told staff in June 2024 that the paper’s losses had at one point reached about $100 million. His tenure, promoted as a period of “transformation,” was widely described by staff and observers as contentious.
Lewis did not take a visible public role when the layoffs were announced: he was absent from the mandatory Zoom call and issued no immediate message to readers. The absence drew criticism after he was photographed the next day on a Northern California red carpet at a Super Bowl–related event, which many staff and journalists saw as tone-deaf.
The staff reductions hit major coverage areas. NPR reported the sports desk was eliminated, local news staffing fell from more than 40 to roughly a dozen, and international coverage was heavily reduced — including the entire Middle East team and the Ukraine bureau chief. One correspondent said she received a layoff notice by email while working in a war zone. Executive Editor Matt Murray said the newsroom will aim to maintain a “presence” in about a dozen global locations, likely relying more on local stringers, and that the overall editorial staff is expected to be about 500 going forward. He said the paper will narrow its editorial focus to areas such as U.S. politics, national security and health that draw strong reader interest.
Newsroom morale had deteriorated in recent weeks; staff members sent letters directly to owner Jeff Bezos asking him to protect colleagues and stabilize finances, and those appeals reportedly went unanswered. Bezos issued a statement Saturday promising an “exciting and thriving next chapter” and saying reader data should help set priorities. In the same release naming D’Onofrio as acting CEO, D’Onofrio pledged to “secure both the legacy and business” of the institution.
Lewis arrived at The Post after a career that included serving as publisher and CEO of The Wall Street Journal and work for Rupert Murdoch’s organizations in Britain and the U.S. His time at The Post was shadowed by questions about his conduct in Britain: plaintiffs in civil suits against Murdoch tabloids alleged Lewis had been involved in efforts to conceal evidence. NPR reported that, before he started at The Post, Lewis had pressured the network to drop reporting about those London cases and had tried to dissuade The Post’s then-executive editor from pursuing the story.
His personnel choices and editorial priorities sparked internal disputes. Lewis brought in longtime associates and made management changes that prompted departures, including former executive editor Sally Buzbee, who viewed a proposed new role as a demotion. Plans to appoint a former British colleague to a top news job were derailed amid renewed scrutiny of past conduct.
Bezos’s stewardship of the paper, once praised when he bought The Post in 2013 as a long-term investment, shifted as losses mounted. In 2023 Bezos removed publisher Fred Ryan after previous strategies failed to halt the financial decline. In late 2024 and early 2025 editorial decisions and changes on the opinion page aligned more with Bezos’s stated priorities; a February 2025 pivot emphasizing “personal liberties and free markets” coincided with sharp subscriber backlash. The paper lost more than 375,000 digital subscribers in a matter of months, a decline estimated at about 15 percent.
Former Post leader Marty Baron criticized leadership choices that he said deepened the crisis. After the layoffs, Baron issued a harsh statement saying the paper’s problems “were made indefinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” Staff staged protests outside the newsroom and circulated flyers accusing Lewis of harming the institution.
Lewis’s resignation message to staff was brief and upbeat: “All — after two years of transformation at The Washington Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” he wrote, adding that the paper could not have a better owner than Bezos and that difficult choices had been necessary to ensure a sustainable future. The note was sent with the subject line “No subject.” Bezos and representatives for Lewis and Murray offered no additional comment beyond the statements released Saturday evening.