NEW YORK: The struggling Washington Post found itself in some turmoil on Monday following the abrupt departure of the newspaper’s executive editor and a hastily announced restructuring plan aimed at stopping an exodus of readers over the past few years.
Post publisher Will Lewis and Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor named to temporarily replace Sally Buzbee, met with reporters and editors at the Post on Monday to explain changes that had been outlined in a Sunday night email.
The plan includes splitting the newsroom into three separate divisions with managers who report to Lewis — one that encompasses the Post’s core news reporting, one with opinion pieces and the third devoted to attracting new consumers through innovative uses of social media, video, artificial intelligence and sales.
Although Murray is temporarily replacing Buzbee through the November presidential election, the eventual plan places no one in the role of an executive editor who oversees the entire newsroom. Buzbee was said to disagree with the plan and chose to leave rather than be put in charge of one of the divisions, the Post reported.
Lewis was not made available for an interview Monday, and Buzbee did not immediately return a message.
“It definitely kind of blindsided people,” said Paul Farhi, a recently retired media reporter at the Post. “But it shows you that Will Lewis is working out of a sense of crisis and urgency. He’s only been there five months and he’s making gigantic changes to the newsroom.”
Like most news organizations, the Post has lost readers — a decline more acute because the Washington-based outlet boomed with the interest in politics during the Trump administration. The Post’s website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020, and had dropped to 50 million at the end of 2023. The Post lost a reported $77 million last year.
“Although (Post owner) Jeff Bezos is very rich, it has been my observation that billionaires don’t like to lose money,” said Margaret Sullivan, a former Post columnist and now the executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia Journalism School.
Lewis told staff members on Monday that “I’m not interested in managing decline. I’m interested in growth,” according to a person who attended the meeting. The new publisher also bluntly told staffers that “people are not reading your stuff. We need to take decisive action.”
The new division designed to attract new customers — the Post called it a “third newsroom” — is steeped in some mystery. While the Post at one time headquartered the people running its digital products in a separate building, for several years it has integrated that and social media into the regular newsroom, as have many organizations. It’s hard to predict how the new structure will work, and there are likely to be changes as they are put in place, Sullivan said.
“Maybe it’s brilliant and innovative,” she said. “But it just strikes me as being odd.”
There are significant questions surrounding the restructuring — including suggestions that dividing the newsroom into three parts could create fragmentation of the Post’s overall news report. Will separation into different units hinder the kind of collaboration that creates fluid multiplatform journalism?
“It feels so retro — reminiscent of search engine optimization, social media and pivoting to video, just as AI and agents threaten to become a new web,” said Jeff Jarvis, Jarvis, author of “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet.”
Murray will be in charge of this division following the election. After that, Robert Winnett, a longtime editor at the Telegraph in England who worked with Lewis there, will take over the core reporting functions at the Post, the newspaper said.
There was some concern expressed by Post staff members about three men — all of them new to a newspaper that takes some pride in journalists working their way up through the ranks and two of them British-born — being in charge at a crucial time.
“In a few months, two British-born editors will be running the leading newspaper in the capital of the United States,” Farhi said. “It was kind of unimaginable a couple of months ago.”
They won’t be alone. Other US-based news organizations with British-born leaders included The Wall Street Journal, with editor in chief Emma Tucker; CNN, with chairman and CEO Mark Thompson; and The Associated Press, with Daisy Veerasingham as president and CEO.
Lewis was also questioned about his commitment to diversity after the first woman to be the editor in charge of the Post has left. He said he was committed to it “and you’ll see it going forward,” according to the person at the meeting.
Lewis has said that the Post will be experimenting with different pay tiers for digital subscriptions, for people who may be interested in particular topics or stories instead of the entire package, similar to products offered by Politico, for example. As editor, Buzbee has been beefing up the Post’s coverage on topics like cooking and climate that appeal to particular readers.
Lewis has talked about searching for ways to reach millions of Americans who want to keep informed but don’t feel like traditional news products serve their needs.
In one sense, efforts to make organizations like the Post and the Times more attractive to subscribers may contribute to the trends hurting local news, Farhi said. As the newspapers seek out more national and international customers, he said, they are much less likely to invest in covering local news.
With its top editor abruptly gone, The Washington Post grapples with a hastily announced restructure
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With its top editor abruptly gone, The Washington Post grapples with a hastily announced restructure
Dark times under Syria’s Assad hit Arab screens for Ramadan
- Talking about Syria’s prisons and the torture, enforced disappearances and executions that took place there was taboo during half a century of the Assad family’s iron-fisted rule
BEIRUT: A Syrian prison warden screams at a group of chained, crouching inmates in a harrowing scene from one of several Ramadan television series this year that tackle the era of former ruler Bashar Assad.
Talking about Syria’s prisons and the torture, enforced disappearances and executions that took place there was taboo during half a century of the Assad family’s iron-fisted rule, but the topics are now fertile ground for creative productions, though not without controversy.
An abandoned soap factory north of the Lebanese capital Beirut has been transformed into a replica of the basements and corridors of Syria’s Saydnaya prison, a facility synonymous with horror under Assad, for the series “Going Out to the Well.”
Crews were filming the last episodes this week as the Muslim holy month kicked off — primetime viewing in the Arab world, with channels and outlets furiously competing for eager audiences’ attention.
Director Mohammed Lutfi told AFP that “for Syrians, Saydnaya prison is a dark place, full of stories and tales.”
The series focuses on the 2008 prison riots in Saydnaya, “when inmates revolted against the soldiers and took control of the prison, and there were negotiations between them and Syrian intelligence services,” he said.
The military prison, one of Syria’s largest and which also held political prisoners, remains an open wound for thousands of families still looking for traces of their loved ones.
Tragedy into drama
The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison estimates that some 30,000 people were thrown into the facility after the 2011 uprising against Assad began, but only 6,000 came out after he was toppled.
Amnesty International has described the prison outside Damascus, which was notorious for torture and enforced disappearances, as a “human slaughterhouse.”
In the opening scene of the series, the main character is seen in a tense exchange with his family before jumping into a deep well.
The symbolic scene in part captures the struggles of the detainees’ relatives. Many spent years going from one Assad-era security facility to another in search of their missing family members.
Syrian writer Samer Radwan said on Facebook that he finished writing the series several months before Assad’s fall.
Director Lutfi had previously told AFP that challenges including actors’ fears of the Assad authorities’ reaction had prevented filming until after his ouster.
Since then, productions have jumped on the chance to finally tackle issues related to his family’s brutal rule.
Another series titled “Caesar, no time, no place” presents testimonies and experiences based on true stories from inside Syria’s prisons during the civil war, which erupted in 2011.
But in a statement this week, the Caesar Families Association strongly rejected “transforming our tragedy into dramatic material to be shown on screen.”
“Justice is sought in court, not in film studios,” said the association, whose name refers to thousands of images smuggled out of Syria more than a decade ago showing bodies of people tortured and starved to death in the country’s prisons.
Refugees
Another series, “Governorate 15,” sees two Saydnaya inmates, one Lebanese and one Syrian, leave the facility after Assad’s fall and return to their families.
Producer Marwan Haddad said that the series tackles the period of “the Syrian presence in Lebanon” through the Lebanese character.
The show also addresses the Syria refugee crisis through the story of the Syrian character’s family, who fled to the struggling neighboring country to escape the civil war.
“For years we said we didn’t want Lebanon to be (Syria’s) 15th province” and each person fought it in their own way, said Lebanese screenwriter Carine Rizkallah.
Under Assad’s father Hafez, Syria’s army entered Lebanon in 1976 during the country’s civil war and only left in 2005 after dominating all aspects of Lebanese life for almost three decades.
It was also accused of numerous political assassinations.
Lebanese director Samir Habchy said that the actors represent their “own community’s problems” in the “Lebanese-Syrian series.”
The show could prove controversial because it includes real people who “are still alive and will see themselves” in the episodes, he added.
