On the Sunday after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I found myself on the roof terrace at the Ned—the elegant, neo-patrician members’ club overlooking the Treasury and National Mall—talking shop with a public affairs executive who manages the advertising spend for one of the town’s trade groups. As inevitably happens during polite conversation in official D.C., our exchange turned to the state of The Washington Post, which has obviously been enduring one of the more dismal chapters in its sesquicentennial history.

The weekend was a reminder that fates change fast in Washington. Exactly one year earlier, Will Lewis, the Post’s notoriously inept former publisher, spent $1.3 million of the paper’s already strained budget to host his own post–Correspondents’ Dinner brunch at the very same club. Since then, the Post has alienated more subscribers, suffered heftier losses, cut a third of its newsroom, and shuttered most of its local and sports coverage. Will himself was excommunicated after months of absentee leadership and one truly ill-timed lads’ trip to the Super Bowl. Indeed, this week, I learned about one of his final derelictions of duty: Before the February cuts, Mark Ein, the affable D.C. venture capitalist and owner of the Washington City Paper, put forward a proposal to acquire the Post’s local and sports coverage and integrate it into his own title. I’m reliably told that Will never even brought it to Jeff Bezos’s attention.

This time around, the Post decided to forgo the Correspondents’ Dinner festivities, settling instead for hosting one of the many unremarkable pre-dinner receptions that take place in the drab, subterranean conference rooms at the Hilton. The humble showing seemed commensurate with the Post’s diminished standing in the Washington influence economy. Up on the Ned’s roof, my new friend divulged that he intended to spend “10 percent of what I spent last year” on advertising with the paper.

The Post has a tough row to hoe, obviously, and many in Washington still ponder who Bezos will task with leading that unglamorous effort. In truth, however, Bezos already has his guy. Sources familiar with the matter tell me the plan is simply to proceed with Jeff D’Onofrio, the chief financial officer, who was appointed acting C.E.O. and publisher after Will’s defenestration. There is no formal executive search underway, and no plans to replace D’Onofrio anytime soon. In the most likely scenario, one source said, D’Onofrio, a journeyman C.F.O. who once served as chief executive of Tumblr, will simply drop the “acting” title and formally assume the role.

Earlier this week, I’m told, D’Onofrio convened executive team members for a two-day, on-site “off-site” to map out a strategy for getting the Post to profitability. While there are no specific initiatives he’s ready to announce, the guiding principle was to abandon Will’s obsession with shiny objects—the third newsroom, A.I.-generated podcasts, etcetera—and simply invest in repairing the damage he did to the newsroom, the brand, and the product. This will include fairly rudimentary fixes, like updating the website and mobile app, as well as gestures that reprioritize journalism as the North Star, such as bringing back the Ben Bradlee and Eugene Meyer awards. “We need to rebuild our foundation,” a Post source told me.

Post sources note a stark vibe shift between Will and D’Onofrio, unsurprisingly, and many seem grateful to have a publisher who’s in the newsroom and “not hiding on the ninth floor,” as one source put it. (Never underestimate how much this symbolic gesture matters to journalists.) They also commend him for trying to fix the “culture.” In a memo earlier this month, he called journalism the “foundational strength and the core product,” and stressed a commitment to “open communication and shared values.”

Trophies and culture aren’t going to save the business, of course. The Post has lost a lot of ground in the last half-decade, and it’s hard to see how it regains relevance and competes for talent, subscribers, and ad dollars after being all but left for dead. It’s a heavily saturated market, as you know. And as if the Times, Journal, Politico, Axios, Puck, Punchbowl, Semafor, and all the rest weren’t enough, it now has to fend off Robert Allbritton’s Star, too.

D’Onofrio said the Post’s goal “is to be a break-even business this year,” but that its “longer-term goal is to grow and to be a profitable business that reinvests our profits back into our journalism.” That’ll be a grind, and, at this point, it’s hard to imagine the M&A play or product innovation that could meaningfully alter the trajectory. More likely, D’Onofrio will be forced to play defense: stanching subscriber churn, coaxing back wary advertisers, and persuading a shell-shocked newsroom to believe again in an institution that once defined the category. The job actually isn’t reinventing the future of news, but proving that the Post still deserves some small place in it.