In the weeks before The Washington Post's editor-in-chief abruptly resigned on Sunday, her relationship with the company's chief executive had become increasingly strained.
In mid-May, the two men clashed over whether to run a story about a British hacking scandal that had some ties to Washington Post Chief Executive Will Lewis, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.
According to people familiar with the matter, editor-in-chief Sally Busby told Lewis that the magazine would cover a judge's expected ruling in a long-running British lawsuit filed by Prince Harry and others against several of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid newspapers.
As part of the ruling, the judge is expected to say whether Mr. Lewis' name can be added to a list of executives the plaintiffs allege were involved in a scheme to cover up evidence of the newspaper hacking. Mr. Lewis told Mr. Buzbee that the cases involving him were not newsworthy, the people said.
When Buzbee said the Post would run the story anyway, he abruptly ended the conversation, calling her decision an error of judgment.
Shaken by the exchange, Buzbee sought advice from trusted sources outside of The Washington Post about how to handle the situation. A few days later, on May 21, the judge ruled that Lewis could be added to the case, and The Post ran an article about the decision.
Mr. Lewis did not block the story from publication, but the incident continued to weigh on Mr. Buzbee as he considered his future at the paper, according to two people with knowledge of his decision-making process. His eventual decision to resign rocked one of the nation's leading news organizations.
The back-and-forth over the court ruling wasn't the primary reason for Buzbee's departure. Buzbee was already contemplating her future at The Post because of an editorial restructuring plan that Lewis presented to her in April, according to people familiar with the matter. Lewis had offered Buzbee a job running a new division focused on social media and service journalism, the people said. Because the editor-in-chief's duties included overseeing all aspects of news coverage, Buzbee viewed it as a demotion.
A spokesman for The Washington Post declined to comment, and Mr. Buzbee also declined to comment.
Lewis was tasked late last year by The Washington Post's owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with restructuring the paper, which had been suffering a steep decline in readership and annual losses of tens of millions of dollars. Lewis, who served as chief executive officer of Dow Jones, the News Corp. subsidiary that publishes The Wall Street Journal, has spent the past few months developing a strategy to overhaul the paper's business.
He decided to split the editorial department into three divisions: a core newsroom covering politics, business and other topics, an opinion section and a new division that would focus on social media, including video storytelling, and service journalism, including health and lifestyle coverage. (The Washington Post is currently divided into two parts: news and opinion.)
In offering Mr. Busbee the role of head of social media and service journalism, Mr. Lewis told Mr. Busbee he would have a say in hiring an editor to oversee the core news business, and Mr. Lewis then told Mr. Busbee he chose Robert Winnett, a former editor at The Daily Telegraph who had previously worked with Mr. Lewis, the people said.
The conversation between Mr. Lewis and Mr. Buzbee about the wiretap reporting took place in a conference room outside The Post's newsroom, where Post executives were discussing changes Mr. Lewis was planning to make to the paper.
Editors sometimes warn executives about troubling stories before they are published. In 2013, Mr. Buzbee's predecessor as editor, Martin Baron, told Post publisher Katharine Weymouth before the paper began covering a sensitive story about the National Security Agency. In 1971, reformist editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee told former Post owner Katharine Graham about a story about the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the secret history of the Vietnam War, before it was published.
Lewis declined to comment on the Washington Post article about the wiretapping ruling, but in multiple media interviews he has vigorously denied allegations that he was involved in covering up wiretapping while he was a senior executive at Murdoch. The Post ran a story about the lawsuit in March that also named Lewis.
During a contentious staff meeting on Monday, Lewis defended his business strategy, telling editors that The Post had lost $77 million last year and seen a 50% drop in readership since 2020, and that it needed to make fundamental changes to succeed.
“Let's not fool ourselves. Things need to turn around, right?” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “You're losing a lot of money. Your readership has been cut in half in the last few years. People aren't reading your stories.”
He continued: “I had to take decisive and urgent action to seek out the best of the best people I've ever worked with and lead us down a different path.”