- Jeff Bezos is hiring new leadership and trying to end The Washington Post’s financial collapse.
- But on Friday, a key figure, Robert Winnett, decided not to join the company and run the editorial department after all.
- This comes after a messy exhumation of Mr Bezos and his boss’s British past. Now Mr Bezos needs a new plan.
Jeff Bezos has big plans to reinvent The Washington Post, and it looks like they’re going awry.
Robert Winnett, a star of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, was sworn in as the paper’s next editor-in-chief but resigned on Friday morning.
He resigned from the post after a number of revelations about his past as a writer in London and that of his old friend Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post who had brought him to the top job.
The news was confirmed in a message sent to staff by The Telegraph’s editor-in-chief Chris Evans and seen by Business Insider, which said Winnett would remain with the paper.
The recent furore over Mr. Winnett’s hiring has revealed a deep-rooted culture clash between the Post’s high moral standards and Britain’s less scrupulous media, including the Telegraph and the Sunday Times of London, where both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Winnett cut their teeth.
Lewis will remain in his position, but the US media elite are openly wondering whether he will also resign. Even if he does not, Winnett’s departure has blown a hole in his plans and credibility.
That’s a concern for Bezos, who had hoped that Lewis and Winnett would revamp the editorial department and breathe new life into the Post.
The publication, which Bezos bought in 2013, continues to lose funding and readers.
Lewis recently told Post staff that the paper has lost half its readership since 2020 and lost more than $1 million in one week last year.
His promise was to connect with new readers, restructure the editorial department and bring in Mr. Winnett to run the core news and politics operations.
He praised Winnett as a worthy pioneer for the newspaper that exposed the Watergate scandal.
In Britain, Winnett is extremely widely respected for exposing what is widely known as the expenses scandal.
He uncovered widespread fraud in parliamentary expense accounts, subverting the political system and forcing many members to resign.
But the story was told very differently in the United States, where the Telegraph paid for the information and Winnett facilitated the transfer of more than $100,000 to his source.
What the British saw as a legitimate means to an end, many Americans saw as an anomaly.
At the same time, a new investigation into Mr Lewis’s past has revealed he may have handled stolen material – albeit within UK media law – and may have overseen the destruction of evidence in the wiretapping scandal that rocked Fleet Street in the early 2010s.
With the Post’s union vocally complaining and at least one staff member telling BI that he is growing increasingly uneasy about the new management, it’s fair to say Lewis has lost his editorial team.
Bezos gave Lewis his full support this week.
“We need to change as a company,” he said in a forceful email, noting that Lewis remains the person to lead them there.
Bezos assured editors that he would do so without compromising The Post’s high standards.
But now that Winnett, the man in charge of the plan, is gone, Bezos urgently needs a new solution.
