Minutes after Washington Post Chief Executive Will Lewis told employees on Sunday night that the paper's editor-in-chief, Sally Buzbee, was being replaced, managers gathered on a conference call to hear from their boss one last time.
Buzbee said Lewis' new organizational structure — which essentially split the Post's newsroom and opinion department into three smaller divisions — hasn't worked well for him, adding that Lewis is pushing aggressive moves to turn the Post around and has asked editors to reserve judgment for now.
“I would have liked to stay on to see this through, but the situation has become such that that's not possible,” Buzbee said, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The shocking call, which some in attendance described as funereal, added to growing tensions between Lewis and his team, who have set about revamping the Post since taking over in January.
Many reporters and editors had expected Mr. Buzbee to stay in his position at least through the November presidential election. Just two weeks ago, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Buzbee addressed The Post staff together in a much-anticipated all-hands meeting.
But Ms. Buzbee was unhappy with Mr. Lewis's plans to split The Post's editorial department into divisions, and the two quickly reached an impasse, two people with knowledge of her thinking said. Mr. Lewis said she could run one of the two departments, but she backed out, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.
The reorganization would have effectively demoted Mr. Buzbee, who is currently in charge of all of The Post's news coverage, and the new structure, which would add a new division focused on service and social media journalism under the supervision of a new editor-in-chief, would have removed much of The Post's editorial coverage from Mr. Buzbee's control.
Lewis will appoint Matt Murray, a former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, as Buzbee's temporary replacement. Murray will oversee The Post's newsroom as editor in chief during the election and then move to oversee a division focused on service and social media journalism after the election.
New editor Robert Winnett will take over the company's core reporting areas after spending the last decade running news at The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
David Shipley will continue to run the Post's opinion section. Messrs. Winnett, Murray and Shipley will report directly to Mr. Lewis.
Murray, 58, was introduced to The Post's editorial staff at a town hall meeting on Monday that began with a lengthy round of applause for Buzbee, according to several people who attended. During the meeting, Lewis and Murray were grilled by Post reporters about the lack of diversity in the candidates hired to replace Buzbee. Murray, Winnett and Shipley are all white and male.
According to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, Ashley Parker, one of The Washington Post's star political reporters, asked Lewis how the paper reached its decision, adding that a skeptical interpretation might be that Lewis was simply hiring an associate to help run the Post.
“When you were here before, you spoke very movingly about how much you value diversity. And people talk about diversity, but when the time comes, they say, 'Well, I looked around and I couldn't find anybody,'” Parker said.
Lewis responded by saying diversity has been a “constant challenge” for the Washington Post, adding that during his time at Dow Jones, the paper had “the most diverse name in the history of the paper.”
Murray, a longtime confidant of Lewis, was appointed to lead The Wall Street Journal in 2018. He served in a variety of editorial roles at the paper for more than two decades and has been at the helm through the coronavirus pandemic.
The editorial change comes at a sensitive time for the Post as it prepares to cover the final stages of the presidential election, including the nominating conventions in Chicago and Milwaukee this summer — highly unusual for a major US newspaper to replace its top editor at this time.
At a town hall meeting two weeks ago, Lewis rattled off a laundry list of priorities: “Build,” “Fix,” “Tell,” and “Deliver.” He noted that the Post is struggling, having lost more than $70 million last year and seen its readership drop by 50 percent in the same period.