Within a handful of days, William Lewis was both knighted by British royalty and hired by one of the richest men in the world as CEO and publisher of The Washington Post.
One role, ceremonial with few responsibilities or expectations. The other, quite the opposite.
In an interview Sunday, the London-born veteran media executive acknowledged the challenges of the job ahead — a softening ad market, a shrinking and distracted audience, a staff coping with anticipated cuts — while professing optimism about the institution he’s joining.
“We’re going to expand. We’re going to get our swagger back,” Lewis said, echoing a word that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has used about the news organization he bought a decade ago. “I know that right now is not our greatest time, but we’re going to grow again. And we’re going to get that confidence back and that swagger back. I can tell you that with absolute confidence.”
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A former reporter, Lewis, 54, has had firsthand involvement in some of the biggest stories for the British press over the past quarter century: As a young business writer for the Financial Times — and “a journalist’s journalist,” in the words of one colleague — he broke the news of Exxon’s merger with Mobil in 1999. A decade later, he steered the Telegraph’s investigative reporting into lawmakers’ misuse of public funds for personal expenses.
He also had a special vantage on that industry’s biggest debacle, after being assigned to help clean up the mess at News Corp. in the wake of the phone-hacking and police bribery scandal that wracked Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire more than a decade ago. That job preceded his most prominent role until now — the six years he spent as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones.
Still, Lewis’s hiring at The Post drew immediate curiosity across the media world because of his history working in the highly partisan British media world, and in particular with Murdoch, the billionaire who became a driving force in global conservative politics.
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At The Post, Lewis will be in charge of the entire company, not with shaping its news report or opinion section. The executive editor, Sally Buzbee, runs the newsroom; opinions editor David Shipley runs the editorial page, which has historically endorsed more Democratic presidential candidates than Republicans. Both will report to him. This distinction applies to most newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, which runs a tightly conservative editorial page but a nonpartisan news report.
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One old friend who cheered Lewis’s appointment was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who wrote a column for the U.K. Daily Telegraph when Lewis was its editor.
“Will Lewis is an outstanding editor with a very sharp business brain,” said Johnson in a statement released to The Post. “There is no one better at organizing a day-by-day campaign to bring new information into the public domain. And he is therefore a great fit with The Washington Post.”
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Johnson, a Conservative who recommended Lewis for a knighthood, also described Lewis as a fellow “Brexiteer” — an assessment Lewis denied in his interview.
“No, I wouldn’t say it’s true,” Lewis said. “He has no idea what my views of Brexit are.”
Lewis disagrees with media descriptions of him as a former “Murdoch lieutenant,” noting they haven’t spoken in three years and that he has always upheld independent journalism regardless of ownership.
As for his own political views, he said he believes in “creating the right environment for wealth creation” and described himself as socially liberal. (“People should be able to call themselves what they want to call themselves. They should self-determine. They should be left alone and be who they want to be.”) And he emphasized his commitment to democracy and fairness in society.
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“A lot of people start life from a different place than others and as a result, remain disadvantaged forever. And that’s not good. And there can be things that are done to stop that or mitigate that,” he said.
But his true passion is journalism — “I wish I was still a journalist,” he said — and he ticked off possible goals and priorities for The Post: bringing in younger audiences, using artificial intelligence as “a supplement and way to make our journalism even better,” new subscription strategies and pushing even harder on “more personalized offerings” for news consumers.
He said he is committed to traditional journalistic principles — “the separation of nonpartisan news from reported commentary [and] from commercial activity.” But he wants to find more revenue sources. “I don’t like having all our eggs in one basket … so if advertising dips, it’s not [to the] panic stations.”
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Lewis, who left the Wall Street Journal in 2020, was playing tennis with his godson in France this summer when he first got a phone call gauging his interest in running The Post.
The search to fill the job had been launched by interim CEO Patty Stonesifer after Fred Ryan, who held the role during most of Bezos’s tenure as owner, stepped down this summer. With the help of a recruiting firm, she seriously considered more than two dozen candidates.
She and Bezos were drawn to Lewis, she said, because he had spent several years “first and foremost as a journalist — and then switched to say that great journalism needs great business.”
The challenges facing The Post, which is projected to take a $100 million loss this year and a 10 percent cut to the staff through buyouts, are “not just business challenges,” she said. They also concern questions about how to “ensure [that] quality journalism can still reach the widest possible audience, and have a financial model that will ensure that it’s an independent source of media.”
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At the time, Lewis had been running News Movement, a start-up focused on delivering nonpartisan news to younger audiences on social platforms. (He hopes to remain a shareholder.) He had also explored purchasing the Telegraph.
But he couldn’t resist the new opportunity. “The Washington Post is the thing,” he said. “It’s the thing I grew up on. I was schooled on Watergate, the Pentagon Papers.”
He said he respected the “lifetime commitment” that Bezos has made to The Post since purchasing it for $250 million in 2013 and ushering in an era of dramatic expansion. “He bought this for the right reasons, and he’s not stopping,” Lewis said.
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A news obsessive — he writes a weekly email roundup of news articles to his friends on “what to read” — he said his first love was financial journalism.
He first led a newsroom at the Telegraph, where he oversaw the coverage of the expense account scandal that rocked the political establishment and prompted the resignation of the speaker of the House of Commons and several ministers.
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Lewis “had to have huge courage to print that story,” said Andrew Porter, a former political journalist who worked on the report. Some critics — and newspaper rivals — criticized it as “chequebook journalism,” so called because the Telegraph paid a reported 110,000 pounds for access to a computer disk taken from a parliamentary fees office — a decision most mainstream news outlets would shun. But Porter said that Lewis “understood how to play that story, he put a team on it, they put themselves in a room for a month, and came out with a series for a month.” Lewis was named Journalist of the Year at the 2010 British Press Awards.
In 2010, Lewis joined Murdoch’s News U.K. empire, and his reputation among some News Corp. journalists took a hit when he was then tasked with helping to clean up the aftermath of the phone hacking scandal, in which journalists were accused of illegally hacking into cellphones.
Several people interviewed for this article said that some Murdoch tabloid journalists believed Lewis sold them out by providing journalists’ information to the police as part of his work on the Management and Standards Committee. Lewis denies it.
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“I did whatever I could to preserve journalistic integrity,” he said. Lewis also downplayed his role on the committee, saying he had a junior position, tasked with ensuring journalistic principles were respected as part of the investigation. But he declined to discuss the episode.
“I took a view very early on that I’m never going to talk about it,” he said. “And it’s either right or wrong that I’ve done that.” He has previously denied accusations that he played a role in concealing emails about the hacking scandal.
Stonesifer said that the sum of Lewis’s 30-year career showed he “didn’t shy away” from difficult decisions. “That kind of bold leadership was part of what we were actually looking for. And believe me, we did our homework to determine whether that leadership went too far.”
At Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020, he oversaw a period of growth in audience and digital subscriptions. Alan Rusbridger, former editor in chief of the Guardian, saw Lewis’s ascension to that role as proof that he had satisfied Murdoch with his handling of the phone hacking scandal. “I’m sure he will negotiate the relationship between proprietor and newsroom with some deftness.”
In 2020, Lewis was reported to be in the running for the top job at the BBC. It didn’t happen. But his interest in the job was telling, said Jane Martinson, author of “You May Never See Us Again,” a new book about the owners of the Daily Telegraph. “The places he’s wanted to run — the BBC, The Washington Post — they are organizations known for great journalism at difficult financial points,” she said. “Maybe he feels that is his challenge. He’ll have lots of ideas.”
Lewis described the totality of his career — from covering misdeeds of politicians across the political spectrum while working at a conservative U.K. paper, to serving as publisher of the Wall Street Journal when it broke the Theranos scandal, imploding a business in which Murdoch had a financial stake — to underscore his commitment to independent journalism, no matter the owner.
“If you’ve been in the media industry 33 years and had the variety of jobs I’ve had, you are going to work for different people with different approaches,” he said. “Now I can bring to bear as my own person having learned the good bits and the bad bits. You will find in me someone that doesn’t get fazed by being shouted at by important politicians.”
Ryan hired Buzbee of the Associated Press to run The Post’s newsroom as executive editor. Lewis, who knew her previously during his time as a member of the AP board, said he’s “a huge fan of hers” and is “100 percent” committed to her remaining in the job.
Lewis will be moving to Washington to take on the role. His wife, Becca, co-head of a primary school in London, will join him likely when the school year ends. He has four children; his eldest daughter lives in D.C., working for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).
And once he begins Jan. 2, he will set about looking “under the hood” as he develops and shares a more detailed plan for The Post’s future. He’s learned in previous roles, that some of the best ideas come in-house — and he plans to search all levels of the current staff for them.
“I’m not a real respecter of hierarchy,” he said.
And he won’t be going by Sir William, either.
Sarah Ellison, Will Sommer and Jeremy Barr contributed to this report.
