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Panic! At The Post
A talent exodus is almost surely on the horizon at The Washington Post, with some of paper's top names weighing whether to leave as morale remains low under chief executive Will Lewis.
Oliver Darcy
December 17, 2024
The Washington Post building. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
On Tuesday afternoon, staffers at The Washington Post gathered on the seventh floor of their offices on K Street to toast to some of the winners of the Eugene Meyer Awards and Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism. This year, the internal gathering also served as a way for the newsroom to bid adieu to Matea Gold, the beloved managing editor who decided this month to depart the newspaper for a job at The New York Times after being passed over for the role of executive editor.
The event was well attended, including by members of The Post royalty, such as Don Graham and Sally Quinn. The toast, it goes without saying, was supposed to be a celebratory affair. Unfortunately, it was anything but. Instead of jubilation, multiple attendees described the mood to me as grim, with staffers emotional as their professional home struggles to escape an ever-quickening tailspin that threatens its future. Channeling the morbid energy in the room, columnist Sally Jenkins delivered remarks in which she said, "This newsroom has been fractured. What I want for Christmas is, I want this place whole again." Then she choked up along with a number of staffers.
Suffice to say, but it wasn't the note Posties wanted to end the year on.
Notably absent from the crowd was Will Lewis, The Post's internally reviled publisher and chief executive who officially started the job in January and managed to alienate his troops in only a matter of months. In truth, his lack of attendance was…
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