The New York Times scooped its Washington rival with the news that British media executive and long-time journalist Will Lewis — now Sir Will thanks to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — is to be the new chief executive and publisher of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.

Lewis will take over from acting CEO Patti Stonesipher, a celebrated former executive in the era of Bill Gates at Microsoft and now on the board of Amazon for Bezos. In a statement, Bezos remarked that Lewis was an “exceptional, tenacious industry executive.”

Lewis responded by praising the history of The Washington Post and saying, tellingly, that he was “thrilled and humbled to be at its helm as both a media executive and former reporter.”

It’s that reference to being a reporter that the newsroom of The Washington Post — and those of its rivals — should pay particular attention to. Lewis may be referred to as a veteran executive, but everything he does is steeped in his career as a pugnacious and passionate journalist.

I have known Lewis and worked with him in a couple of different jobs and organisations for most of the past 25 years. He is what you might call a “journalist’s journalist.” He loves a scoop, whether it is his own or from his team, and he is far from conservative in his readiness to clash with establishment hierarchies and at work to push dramatic change in practices.

I predict that with Bezos’s money and his own immense energy, Lewis will shake up The Washington Post — especially in increasing the focus on digital products, Washington politics where it failed to strangle Politico at birth years ago, and in international news to compete with The New York Times. Lewis follows Fred Ryan, who left in June with losses mounting and layoffs planned.

“He was CEO of one of America’s largest subscription-based news organisations at Dow Jones. He performed a very similar role at the Telegraph, which had very similar issue(s) to the Post about 20 years ago … . Good news for [Post] reporters because one, he’s a journalist by background, and two, he’s great at managing rich people who own media,” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, wrote on X.

Lewis is not the sort of cerebral, introvert, journalistic figure the former Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron appeared to be in his tenure at the Post and before that the Boston Globe. Baron commanded respect with his record of leading big investigations and a quiet gravitas. Lewis is a ball of energy and excitement, whether it is over big stories or new projects. Sally Buzbee is, of course, executive editor at The Post and replaced Baron.

Here are some of my recollections from knowing Lewis in multiple guises and what I think that might mean for The Washington Post journalists and perhaps for the business:

• Lewis was a brilliant and hard-charging reporter at The Financial Times in New York when I first knew him. He seemed in a daily battle with Anita Raghavan of The Wall Street Journal. In an era when New York and London banks vied in M&A, they traded scoops day after day and made their newspapers essential reading in both finance hubs.

• Lewis rose to news editor of The Financial Times in London (where I was setting up a digital unit called FTMarketWatch to one side of FT.com). He sharpened news meetings and story choices, demanding scoops — shaking up the somewhat conservative habits of the newspaper and challenging its cozy relationship with the City of London. I am aware that around this time, Lewis had already impressed Rupert Murdoch.

• In a period of editorial turbulence at the FT characterised by succession battles, Lewis and FT colleague Robert Thomson moved to newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch — Lewis as business editor of The Sunday Times and Thomson to edit The Times. Robert, of course, is now chief executive of News Corporation.

• Lewis drove weekly scoops at The Sunday Times and gained deep contacts in the UK and global business scene. His energy was palpable, as was his recognition around this time in the early- to mid-2000s that it was time to invest heavily again in digital.

• The editorship of the rival Daily Telegraph followed, and here is where The Washington Post staff may really start to pay attention. Lewis and a couple of loyal lieutenants created what was then regarded as the most-modern and integrated newsroom in the world, the first of what is now an accepted hub-and-spoke model of news desks with news editing, digital, and newspaper curation at the centre. Occupying what had been the cavernous trading room of the defunct U.S. investment bank Solomon Salomon Smith Barney, the new Telegraph newsroom was a sort of Gordon Gekko/Wall Street moment.

• Scoops and deep immersion in the heart of UK politics — Boris was a columnist on The Telegraph — characterised the Lewis editorship, no more so than a leak of expense claims by members of parliament (which The Times had declined but Lewis seized upon). The story blew the doors of British politics — exposing huge and sometimes comical excess (one MP was said to have put a duck house in his pond on expenses) — led to an official inquiry and arguably led to a deepening distrust of politicians.

• While at The Telegraph, Lewis appeared to me to be heavily influenced by an executive course at Harvard, and he returned from Boston to set up a digital and new media incubator. It didn’t work out, but it excited him and is another signal of what to expect at The Washington Post, which has itself tried to create new digital products and tools like its ARC CMS and now shuttered Zeus advertising network.

• Back to News Corp shortly after beating his old employer to the scoop of a decade, Lewis helped Murdoch manage his London news empire through the crisis of the phone hacking affair that engulfed the company and led Murdoch to close the News of the World — a celebrated Sunday known in the industry for its “dark arts.” In an unusually and necessarily discreet role, Lewis managed a legal, industry, and staff crisis.

• Lewis became chief executive officer of Dow Jones — and publisher of The Wall Street Journal in New York — effectively replacing Murdoch veteran of more than 50 years Les Hinton, who had previously run the London business. At Dow Jones, Lewis drove massive digital growth at the WSJ — nearly doubling subscribers — and remade Dow Jones against the competition from Bloomberg and Reuters. Working in an almost implausibly small but ultra-focused leadership team with Robert Thomson leading the News Corp parent, Lewis became a fixture at Davos and an energetic leader — always concentrating on the journalistic base of the company’s strength.

• Lewis left News Corp in 2020 and returned to London, setting up a private office and an innovative start-up targeting younger audiences and offering other companies services to reach those audiences, The News Movement with his long-term friend Kamal Ahmed. 

Now he moves to The Washington Post, and I predict he will shake up the organisation, probably not least in the newsroom and the emphasis on print.

“His core challenge at the Post will be figuring out how to stop the nine-figure bleeding without embarrassing owner Jeff Bezos with deep cuts to the newsroom,” Semafor co-founder Ben Smith wrote in his newsletter. “Nobody likes their vanity project becoming a PR nightmare. And the Post’s business is a muddle: It recently shelved efforts to become a tech company, and its subscription strategy — to be a discount New York Times — doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.” 

He predicts a shift to digital and niche Washington-led products like politics. Here’s a good read from his meeting with staff.

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