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William Lewis, hired in 2023 by Jeff Bezos to turn around the Washington Post, is stepping down as chief executive and publisher after the company fired about 300 of its roughly 800 reporters this week.
“Now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis wrote in a brief note to colleagues. “During my tenure, difficult decisions have been taken to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.”
Jeff D’Onofrio, the company’s chief financial officer, will become interim chief executive. In a memo, D’Onofrio said the paper was “ending a hard week of change with more change”.
Lewis this week oversaw a plan to drastically cut back the operations of the Washington Post, closing down whole teams covering areas such as sport and books to focus on politics and security.
The plans, which cut about a third of the staff of the newspaper group, were met with outrage from existing and former staff. Marty Baron, the Post’s editor-in-chief at the time of Bezos’s $250mn purchase in 2013, described it as “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organisations”.
Lewis was not immediately available for comment.
This is a developing story
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