Washington Post names William Lewis as CEO – 11/05/2023 – Market

William Lewis, former CEO of Dow Jones and editor of The Wall Street Journal, was named CEO and editor of The Washington Post, the outlet reported last Saturday (4).

The Washington Post said it projects to end the year with a loss of $100 million. The editor added that executives are offering company-wide severance packages in an attempt to reduce headcount by about 10% — the newsroom is expected to shrink to about 940 journalists.

Lewis’ appointment comes at a time when the media industry is dealing with a sluggish advertising market, low trust in news and developments in generative AI technology, which threaten to change the way people find and consume information.

Lewis will assume his duties on January 2, 2024, replacing Patty Stonesifer, who became interim CEO in June. The Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

According to an Oct. 10 email sent by Stonesifer to staff and seen by Reuters, after a review, Stonesifer and senior management determined that the Post’s previous projections for site traffic, subscriptions and advertising growth over the past two years and until 2024 were “overly optimistic”. It’s unclear why these projections were wrong.

Stonesifer replaced Fred Ryan, who resigned in August after nine years as publisher and CEO.

During Ryan’s tenure, the Post grew its digital subscriptions, won 13 Pulitzer Prizes and launched the Arc XP cloud-based digital platform, which serves more than 1,900 websites in 28 countries, the company said in June.

In an article about Ryan’s departure, the Post reported that the majority of its revenue now comes from its digital business and it has about 2.5 million digital subscribers, a change from Ryan’s hiring in September 2014, when the majority of revenue came from its print business.