Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.
“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”
Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)
Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa. These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.
The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”