Of course, Lewis’s grand reinvention was always going to involve
significant turnover, much of it welcome. I can only imagine that he quietly celebrated Sally Buzbee’s resignation over the summer—albeit not all the sturm und drang it created, nor the scrutiny on his own Fleet Street C.V.—and that he more recently delighted in telling unionized WFHers that they could sit at home forever if they didn’t like his five-days-in-office policy. As ever, Lewis’s devilish streak is both a virtue of his leadership and a notable
shortcoming.

As is so often the case in these corporate transformations, the turnover is part of the objective—you can’t change an organization with people pining for the way things used to be. And, in many latent ways, Lewis’s change is already afoot: Instead of staffing up ahead of a new Trump administration, or even working to retain talent, the Post is actively cutting costs
and contemplating acquisitions, operating on the theory that so much of the talent it needs for the next leg of the journey isn’t even in the building yet.

Indeed, Lewis may also believe that the stars of the Post’s previous, Marty Baron-led, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” iteration are not necessarily the ones he’d choose to guide it into its future as a broader, nonpartisan, and
perhaps less sanctimonious news operation. (Baron, for his part, has been regrettably relegated to a no-one-listens-to-me-anymore Twitter scold.) At the same time, Lewis would presumably prefer to keep at least some of the aforementioned stars, since it’s hard to run a newsroom without talent, and his plans to diversify the business through the creation of a “third newsroom,” a pro-tier WP Intelligence product, etcetera, do not obviate the need to maintain the
core political news report. 

As I noted the other week, Lewis’s critics increasingly fear that he doesn’t actually have a real vision for the paper. Indeed, that is one reason the Kara white knight fantasy has been able to take hold in some imaginations. Others fear that he does have a vision but it involves threatening plans, like buying Punchbowl for around the price that Bezos paid for the
Post itself, or pursuing some more serious version of the Daily Mail and General Trust, or some social-forward flimflam. 

What’s particularly depressing about all these strategies is that they’re so obviously at odds: finding a new, more diverse audience on TikTok while also alienating the 2016-20 audience? Reasserting the power of the brand while allowing its most well-known journalists to leave?
Increasingly, it feels like the true signals from leadership are that the fight with the Times is over, the owner is checked out, the future is different, and they can no longer even compete at the local level against the independents who found it remarkably easy to eat their lunch. But all this is apparently what Lewis wanted, and now it’s on him to make it work—or else.