How Walmarts and blue-sky thinking were the making and then the undoing of Will Lewis at the Washington Post
The headline tells the story.
Welcome to Washington Secrets, your guide to who’s up and who is less up. Today, we take a look at Will Lewis’s two years at the Washington Post and rate the chances of a full funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security — spoiler: 1% if you are lucky. Plus there’s more from the three-way Republican car-wreck in Texas. Is it only Tuesday?
The fallout from the Washington Post evisceration continues.
Conservatives are lining up to blame the journalists themselves for writing liberal pablum that no one wanted to read, supporters of the paper blame a billionaire owner who got tired of his plaything, and the paper’s remaining executives have had to deny that they fired correspondents in war zones without offering them help to get home.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Will Lewis, dumped as publisher over the weekend, was responsible for the whole sorry mess.
Lewis was appointed in the fall of 2023. His reputation as a British journalist, who was raised in the hard-charging world of Fleet Street newspapers and had first prospered at the Telegraph, where his team broke the stellar story of MPs’ greedy expenses claims, and later under Rupert Murdoch, made him suspect as far as the genteel newsroom of the Washington Post was concerned.
But he was exactly the sort of editor that Bezos wanted as he tried to work out how to update a business model largely unchanged in a century.
A story that has done the rounds among journalists who worked for Lewis back in the day illustrates his role perfectly.
Back when he was editor of the Telegraph, more than 15 years ago, Secrets is told, he did a tour of the paper’s foreign bureaus.
In the U.S., he outlined his vision for covering one of the biggest, most diverse nations on the planet. What we should do, he mused to a correspondent, is have a reporter in every town and city that has a Walmart.
The reporter did not know quite what to make of it. There were more than 4,000 Walmarts in the U.S. Was Lewis bonkers, in the parlance of British newspaper headlines? Was he suggesting the Telegraph was about to appoint a network of thousands to monitor parking lots and sales of bananas?
On the other hand, maybe it was a genius idea. In 2015, those reporters in small-town America would have charted the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of a new breed of voter long before the rest of the media establishment in New York and Washington caught up.
It was even a nod to the sort of hyperlocal news that has …
The headline tells the story.
Welcome to Washington Secrets, your guide to who’s up and who is less up. Today, we take a look at Will Lewis’s two years at the Washington Post and rate the chances of a full funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security — spoiler: 1% if you are lucky. Plus there’s more from the three-way Republican car-wreck in Texas. Is it only Tuesday?
The fallout from the Washington Post evisceration continues.
Conservatives are lining up to blame the journalists themselves for writing liberal pablum that no one wanted to read, supporters of the paper blame a billionaire owner who got tired of his plaything, and the paper’s remaining executives have had to deny that they fired correspondents in war zones without offering them help to get home.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Will Lewis, dumped as publisher over the weekend, was responsible for the whole sorry mess.
Lewis was appointed in the fall of 2023. His reputation as a British journalist, who was raised in the hard-charging world of Fleet Street newspapers and had first prospered at the Telegraph, where his team broke the stellar story of MPs’ greedy expenses claims, and later under Rupert Murdoch, made him suspect as far as the genteel newsroom of the Washington Post was concerned.
But he was exactly the sort of editor that Bezos wanted as he tried to work out how to update a business model largely unchanged in a century.
A story that has done the rounds among journalists who worked for Lewis back in the day illustrates his role perfectly.
Back when he was editor of the Telegraph, more than 15 years ago, Secrets is told, he did a tour of the paper’s foreign bureaus.
In the U.S., he outlined his vision for covering one of the biggest, most diverse nations on the planet. What we should do, he mused to a correspondent, is have a reporter in every town and city that has a Walmart.
The reporter did not know quite what to make of it. There were more than 4,000 Walmarts in the U.S. Was Lewis bonkers, in the parlance of British newspaper headlines? Was he suggesting the Telegraph was about to appoint a network of thousands to monitor parking lots and sales of bananas?
On the other hand, maybe it was a genius idea. In 2015, those reporters in small-town America would have charted the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of a new breed of voter long before the rest of the media establishment in New York and Washington caught up.
It was even a nod to the sort of hyperlocal news that has …
How Walmarts and blue-sky thinking were the making and then the undoing of Will Lewis at the Washington Post
The headline tells the story.
Welcome to Washington Secrets, your guide to who’s up and who is less up. Today, we take a look at Will Lewis’s two years at the Washington Post and rate the chances of a full funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security — spoiler: 1% if you are lucky. Plus there’s more from the three-way Republican car-wreck in Texas. Is it only Tuesday?
The fallout from the Washington Post evisceration continues.
Conservatives are lining up to blame the journalists themselves for writing liberal pablum that no one wanted to read, supporters of the paper blame a billionaire owner who got tired of his plaything, and the paper’s remaining executives have had to deny that they fired correspondents in war zones without offering them help to get home.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Will Lewis, dumped as publisher over the weekend, was responsible for the whole sorry mess.
Lewis was appointed in the fall of 2023. His reputation as a British journalist, who was raised in the hard-charging world of Fleet Street newspapers and had first prospered at the Telegraph, where his team broke the stellar story of MPs’ greedy expenses claims, and later under Rupert Murdoch, made him suspect as far as the genteel newsroom of the Washington Post was concerned.
But he was exactly the sort of editor that Bezos wanted as he tried to work out how to update a business model largely unchanged in a century.
A story that has done the rounds among journalists who worked for Lewis back in the day illustrates his role perfectly.
Back when he was editor of the Telegraph, more than 15 years ago, Secrets is told, he did a tour of the paper’s foreign bureaus.
In the U.S., he outlined his vision for covering one of the biggest, most diverse nations on the planet. What we should do, he mused to a correspondent, is have a reporter in every town and city that has a Walmart.
The reporter did not know quite what to make of it. There were more than 4,000 Walmarts in the U.S. Was Lewis bonkers, in the parlance of British newspaper headlines? Was he suggesting the Telegraph was about to appoint a network of thousands to monitor parking lots and sales of bananas?
On the other hand, maybe it was a genius idea. In 2015, those reporters in small-town America would have charted the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of a new breed of voter long before the rest of the media establishment in New York and Washington caught up.
It was even a nod to the sort of hyperlocal news that has …
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