Jeff Bezos – Page 2 – Media Nation

What j-students think about newsroom diversity; plus, Bezos whines, and a new editor at the Monitor

Pioneering Black female news leaders, from left: Vanessa De Luca, editor-in-chief of The Root; Lindsay Peoples, editor-in-chief of The Cut; and Kiran Nazish, founding director of the Coalition for Women in Journalism. Photo (cc) 2022 by Collision Conf.

I asked my media ethics students today to think about diversity in newsrooms — what it is, why it matters and how news organizations can foster it at a time when there’s not a whole lot of hiring going on. I took notes, and I thought you’d be interested to see some of their ideas.

How would you define diversity in news?

Ensuring that members of marginalized communities are properly represented.
Encompassing a broad range of diversity — not just race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation but a diversity of opinion, age and life experience.
Aiming for diversity not just inside the newsroom but in the people we seek out for interviews.
Understand that though journalists are supposed to keep their political beliefs out of their coverage, a range of views matters because it informs the way we approach our work.

How can a news organization benefit from diversity?

Reporters can interact more effectively with organizations that represent different groups such as African Americans or the LGBTQ community.
A diverse newsroom can ease polarization by representing a wider range of voices, thus enhancing democracy.
A diverse newsroom will set a different tone than one that is predominantly white and male.
There is less chance of underrepresented groups being mischaracterized in stories.

How can newsrooms become more diverse in an era of financial constraints on hiring?

Thorough DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) training for the reporters who are on staff can be helpful even if the staff itself is not especially diverse.
News organizations should network extensively at organizations representing affinity groups such as Black journalists, LGBTQ journalists and the like so those contacts are already in place when hiring opportunities arise.
Think about diversity in recruiting not just for your own news organization’s internal benefit but to serve the community better.
Offer fellowships to young journalists of color to create a pipeline of people who could be hired when openings occur.

Pretty smart stuff, I’d say.

Bezos’ not-so-fine whine

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wrote a self-serving commentary in which he attempted to justify his last-minute cancellation of the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement.

Among other things, he said that his decision, which he admitted was poorly timed, was aimed at helping to overcome distrust in the media, writing that endorsements help feed the perception of bias:

Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working….

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Bezos’ take on media trust is facile and shallow. The top-line numbers tell us that public distrust of the media has been growing for a generation or two. In reality, though, that’s an artifact of media fragmentation. We all trust the media that we use; liberals and Democrats tend to trust mainstream sources like The New York Times, public radio and, until this past weekend, the Post. Today’s MAGA Republicans trust Fox News and Donald Trump himself. This analysis by the Pew Research Center is four years old, but you get the idea.

The steaming pile of trouble that Bezos just dumped on his paper is that the Post has morphed overnight from a news source trusted by its audience to one that is getting the side-eye from just about everyone.

David Folkenflik of NPR reported Monday that the Post had lost more than 200,000 of its 2.5 million digital and print subscribers in just 24 hours after the Harris endorsement was yanked. That’s on Bezos, and it’s certainly not a sign that his arrogant disrespect for the Post’s editorial board has done anything to engender trust. Quite the opposite.

A new editor at the Monitor

Whenever I want to read the news and not feel like my hair is on fire, I take a look at The Christian Science Monitor, a great news organization that inspires optimism and emphasizes solutions. It’s especially strong on international news, though it covers the U.S. as well.

Once a full-service newspaper, the Monitor has shrunk to a daily newsletter and a weekly newsmagazine aggregating some of the outlet’s best journalism. The Monitor is located down the street from us at Northeastern, and yes, I’m a paid subscriber.

The Monitor announced this week that a new editor will be taking over soon. Christa Case Bryant, a veteran Monitor journalist whose duties have included building up the digital side, running the Jerusalem bureau and covering Congress, will succeed Mark Sappenfield.

In 2009 I wrote a lengthy feature about the Monitor for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) that gets into the paper’s history.

A consumer’s guide to the poorly understood tradition of newspaper endorsements

The newspaper world was rocked last week when two billionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times followed by Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, killed endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris against the wishes of their editorial boards.

Harris supporters erupted in outrage, with many of them vowing to cancel their subscriptions and demanding to know how two wealthy men could be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the editorial process. Aren’t media moguls supposed to be rarely seen and never heard?

Now, it’s true that Bezos’s and Soon-Shiong’s actions were outrageous, but that’s because of the high-handed, disrespectful manner in which they handled the endorsements. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable for newspaper owners to involve themselves in the editorial pages. The problem is that we journalists are not very good at explaining the ethics of our trade, and we too often act arrogantly toward the public we purportedly serve. As a result, endorsements are poorly understood.

Read the rest at CommonWealth Beacon.

The fallout from the Post’s gutless decision; plus, my 2018 book portrayed a very different Bezos

Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.

The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.

Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”

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Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.

If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Make no mistake: Bezos owns this decision. New York Times media reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson write that the Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, and even the ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, tried to talk him out of it, although they note that a Post spokeswoman disputed that and called it a “Washington Post decision.” Continue reading “The fallout from the Post’s gutless decision; plus, my 2018 book portrayed a very different Bezos”

Jeff Bezos, too, shows Trump ‘anticipatory obedience’; plus, death for sale, and Billy Penn at 10

Jeff Bezos. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:

The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.

Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.

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In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.

But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.

Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:

For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.

This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.

This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.

Merchants of death

One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.

Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.

The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:

Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.

It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.

The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.

Lessons from Billy Penn

Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”

Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.

Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.

That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.

More fallout from the LA Times; plus, the Sun shines in Colorado, and news deserts spread

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.

Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

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Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.

Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:

In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.

Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”

Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.

On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.

Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:

I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.

But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.

Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.

Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.

Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.

Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”

Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.

The Sun is shining

A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.

“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”

Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:

The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.

The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.

Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.

The Sun, by the way, is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Ryckman has been a guest on our podcast as well.

The crisis continues

The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.

“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”

Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”

I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.

Arc was supposed to be a key to The Washington Post’s future. It became a problem instead.

Shailesh Prakash, former chief technologist at The Washington Post. Photo (cc) 2017 by Nordiske Mediedager.

Several months ago, Brian Stelter wrote an article (gift link) for The Atlantic exploring how The Washington Post had lost its way. During the Trump years, the Post thrived under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, adding audience and staff as well as turning a profit. Since then, all three of those metrics have nose-dived. Bezos’ choice to turn things around, publisher Will Lewis, is beset by ethical problems that no one seems to want to deal with.

All those issues are explored in detail by Stelter, but there was one fact that stood out to me: The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line. Stelter wrote:

In 2021, the Post’s total profit was about $60 million. In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. [Then-publisher Fred] Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.

If Ryan was right, then there was nothing wrong with the Post that getting Arc under control wouldn’t fix. I was surprised, and I filed that factoid away for future use. Well, the future arrived this week, as the Post announced it was laying off about 25% of Arc’s staff — more than 50 people — in order to stem those losses.

What happened? Stories about the layoffs in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) and Axios don’t really make it clear. But it seems that what at one time had looked like a smart bet on the future went south in a serious way.

CMS’s are universally loathed, but Arc was billed as something different and better — simple and built in a modular manner to made it easier to add features. It’s fast. To this day, the Post’s mobile apps load much more quickly than The New York Times’. The Boston Globe is an Arc customer, and if you use its Arc-based apps (look for a white “B” against a black background), content loads more or less instantly.

When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash touted Arc as a key to the Post’s future success. Internally, the Post’s iteration of Arc featured the infamous “MartyBot” — an image of then-executive editor Marty Baron that popped up on a journalist’s screen as a reminder that a deadline was approaching. One of Arc’s customers was Mark Zusman, the editor and publisher of Willamette Week in Oregon. He told me by email:

They flew a team out here and within three months we were up and running. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly it happened. Arc creates enormous functionality under the hood. I have a happy news team (talk about unusual) and the Post is rolling out improvements on a regular basis.

Prakash told me that he hoped Arc might help the Post become the hub of a news ecosystem that would benefit both the Post and news organizations that licensed the CMS:

I would love it if the platform we built for the Post was powering a lot of other media organizations. That would definitely break down the silos for content sharing, a lot of the silos for analytics, for personalization. The larger the scale the better you can do in some of those scenarios. But those are still aspirational at this point.

Well, Prakash is long gone, and is now vice president of news at Google. Baron has retired. And Arc has failed to deliver on its promise of becoming a revenue-generator for the Post as well as a way for the paper to establish itself as the center of a network of Arc-using news organizations.

I hope we find out what happened. I know that Arc is expensive — probably too expensive for it to be adopted by more than a handful of news clients. Still Axios reports that the CMS has more than 2,500 customers. Maybe the layoffs will allow for a reset that will lead to future growth. But the story of Arc sounds like one of opportunity that slipped away.

Will Lewis is back in the news. And once again, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis. 2019 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Few media executives have benefited from the political chaos of the past month more than Washington Post publisher Will Lewis.

Before the presidential debate of June 27, Lewis seemed to be hanging by a thread over revelations that he was involved in covering up the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids back in 2011. He’s also come under fire for approving payments to a source while he was working at another paper and, more recently, demanding that journalists — including Post executive editor Sally Buzbee, who later left the paper — not report on his transgressions.

Since the debate, which led to weeks of frenzied coverage regarding President Biden’s age and fitness, his subsequent withdrawal from the race, and the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris (not to mention an assassination attempt against Donald Trump), Lewis’ fate had been forgotten.

Until now.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who earlier revealed that Lewis promised him an exclusive interview if Folkenflik would give Lewis’ ethical problems a good leaving-alone, reported on Tuesday that new documents show Lewis has been accused of making up a story 13 years ago “to shield evidence from police of possible crimes at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids.” The accusations were leveled as part of a lawsuit brought against Murdoch’s tabloids by Prince Harry and other prominent political figures in the U.K.

Folkenflik’s story is filled with names and details, but essentially Lewis is accused of faking a security threat “to justify the deletion of millions of emails dating from the start of 2008 through the end of 2010.” Here’s the heart of Folkenflik’s report:

In July 2011, when police first learned of the deleted emails, Lewis explained that Murdoch’s company was compelled to get rid of them because of a tip that he and a senior executive received nearly six months earlier: an “outside source” told them that former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was conspiring with a News UK employee and another person to steal the emails of the CEO. That unnamed person was said to be Tom Watson, then a leading member of parliament and critic of the Murdochs. The IT person was later alleged to have been a former News UK staffer.

Brown has denounced the claim as false and outrageous. He’s asked Scotland Yard for a criminal investigation of the episode involving Lewis. Watson, who is among scores of litigants suing News UK alleging illegal invasions of privacy, has denied it. In court, the lead trial attorney for Watson, Harry and the others called the story “a ruse.”

Writing in The Guardian, Caroline Davies goes into detail about minutes of a meeting between police officials and Lewis in July 2011. In the excerpt below, “Rebekah” is Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch’s News International company, and “BCL” is the law firm that was representing Murdoch’s interests. Here’s what Lewis reportedly told detectives:

We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails and had passed them to Tom Watson MP.

This came to Rebekah. I was asked to meet the source. I will consult with BCL as to whether I can tell you the identity of the source. The source repeated the threat. Then the source came back and said it was a former member of staff and the emails had definitely been passed and that it was controlled by Gordon Brown. This added to our anxieties. We took steps to try and be more specific around her emails.

Folkenflik and Davies report that Lewis is also accused of leaking an audio recording aimed at harming a critic of Murdoch’s proposed acquisition of the Sky broadcasting service. That acquisition was nixed after the phone-hacking schedule came to light.

Lewis has denied any wrongdoing, though he would not speak with Folkenflik.

The Post, along with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is one of our three great daily newspapers. We all have an interest in its surviving and thriving after several years of losing circulation and money. It’s been clear for some time that Lewis lacks the ethical compass needed to lead the Post.

Owner Jeff Bezos might have hoped that Lewis had survived the worst of it. But as the most recent developments show, this saga is not done playing out. It’s hard to see how it will end well for Lewis.

Earlier coverage.

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Washington Post update: Winnett withdraws while Lewis hangs on — for now

Robert Winnett will not be joining The Washington Post as executive editor this fall. The announcement (free link) was made by publisher Will Lewis, who is still at his job even though Winnett pulled out after his and Lewis’ gross breaches of journalistic ethics in the U.K. were revealed by several news outlets, including the Post itself.

I continue to believe Lewis isn’t long for his position, either. Two Pulitzer Prize-winning Post journalists, David Maraniss and Scott Higham, have called on Lewis to leave, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more in a few days.

Under Lewis’ absurd scheme for reorganizing the newsroom, the current interim executive editor, Matt Murray, who was brought in when Sally Buzbee quit rather than accept a demotion, is supposed to move over to run a “third newsroom” this fall that will comprise social media and, well, stuff, none of which Lewis has clearly defined. Murray, in turn, would be replaced by Winnett.

Instead, Winnett will remain as deputy editor of the Telegraph Media Group in the U.K. Murray, who had been editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, has made a good first impression, according to Poynter’s Tom Jones and other accounts I’ve seen, so perhaps he’ll remain as executive editor. But owner Jeff Bezos needs to do something soon — like maybe today — about the Lewis disaster.

Earlier coverage.

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Drip, drip, drip

Three new data points in the ongoing implosion of Washington Post publisher Will Lewis:

• While working for then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Lewis reportedly urged Johnson and other senior officials to “clean up” their phones — that is, to remove photos and other incriminating information that could be used against them in an investigation into violations of COVID-19 lockdown rules. Spokespeople for Lewis and Johnson deny it (The Guardian).

• We’ve been waiting for a Post legend to weigh in. Neither Bob Woodward nor Marty Baron has been heard from yet, but Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor David Maraniss has broken his silence. In a post on Facebook, Maraniss wrote: “I don’t know a single person at the Post who thinks the current situation with the publisher and supposed new editor can stand. There might be a few, but very very few. Jeff Bezos owns the Post but he is not of and for the Post or he would understand. The issue is one of integrity not resistance to change.” The “new editor” is Robert Winnett, a longtime associate of Lewis’ who is supposed to become executive editor of the Post this fall (Facebook).

• Post owner Jeff Bezos has written a message to the newsroom assuring the staff that “the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change” and offering his support for Lewis — “though not explicitly,” as CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy observes. It sounds like Bezos wants to buck up Lewis while leaving open the possibility that he’ll have to go. Frankly, that point was reached days ago (CNN.com).

Earlier coverage.

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