Lately, @jeffbezos may be suffering from a case of buyers’ remorse, and it is not only because he lost $77 million last year as owner of washingtonpost.com. He may also be wondering whether he should have shopped a little longer before naming William Lewis publisher.
Now, as Lewis weathers a storm of negative mainstream media scrutiny, likely enabled by a demoralized newsroom, the question remains: will Bezos stand by his man?
On paper, Lewis’ credentials are impeccable. He competed on Fleet Street as an aggressive reporter and editor. Under Rupert Murdoch, he followed a ruthless playbook to save the most valuable assets of News International. In New York, as CEO of Dow Jones, he rationalized a disparate collection of assets from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to Market News.
Meanwhile, Bezos has struggled with his investment. The newsroom has fallen into the trap of appearing more partisan than it needs to be and risked squandering the paper’s historic Watergate-era legacy. Tragically, The Post may have sacrificed its once vaunted credibility in the pursuit of ideological purity, even as Bezos has offered his time and deep pockets to regain lost readership.
So, Bezos knew he needed to shake up one of Washington’s most storied institutions and Lewis won among the most prestigious and powerful positions in journalism. He had a good start. In the shadow of Katherine Graham, he presented a plausible turnaround strategy to the newsroom. In the shadow of Katherine Graham, he struck equal notes of collaboration and congeniality.
But it all unraveled in a matter of hours when Executive Editor resigned rather than accepted Lewis’ demotion. Then the knives came out and stories exploded unearthing Lewis’ connection with the infamous British tabloid phone hacking scandal.
The stories are rich with unidentified sources and untried legal complaints. Although, he is no doubt fighting behind the scenes, Lewis’ public “no comment” is an ironic utterance for any journalist.
There are those who will argue that Lewis isn’t a fit. Others, however, would suggest that his political savvy and commercial instinct are exactly what Bezos needs to restore WaPo to economic and reputational stability. Meanwhile, The Harvard Business Review has cast the leadership struggle as a lesson for all businesses, suggesting that Lewis would be well advised to issue an apology.
The analysis misses a key difference that modern U.S. journalism has sought to institutionalize. Publishers have a notional role strictly as stewards of the business side. Newsrooms are meant to operate with absolute independence. In practice however, the relationship between publishers and editors can be rocky, but it certainly has little in common with conventional corpore governance structure and the hierarchy of chairpersons and CEOs.
On Fleet Street, swashbuckling owners have a long tradition. The legacy tabloid and broadsheet press wear their partisan politics proudly. For Lewis then, the American news standard with it pretense of objectivity is as foreign as it must be irrelevant.
The question now is whether Lewis decides that being publisher of a post-modern American icon is worth it. While he decides, he will have his hands full with his newsroom of restive Washingtonians.