US newsrooms are in trouble: are these British journalists the answer?

“People are not reading your stuff,” Will Lewis bluntly told a room of American journalists on Monday as the British media executive announced an overhaul of The Washington Post’s newsroom just months before a pivotal US election. 

“I can’t sugarcoat it any more,” said Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who was brought in to turn around a stalwart of American journalism that has brought down US presidents but struggled financially in recent years. 

Long-serving reporters were jarred by Lewis’s comments and his decision to replace editor Sally Buzbee with two of his former colleagues. The Post’s union released a statement that it was “troubled” by Buzbee’s sudden exit and “the suggestion from [Lewis] that the financial issues plaguing our company stem from the work of us as journalists”. 

The tensions at the Post speak to a clash in culture and ambition being felt across US news media, as its leaders struggle to arrest declining audiences and revenues.

When he was appointed last year, Lewis became the latest Briton to oversee a leading US newsroom, an influx of hard-edged journalists who cut their teeth in Fleet Street’s scoop-driven fight for readers. Lewis has been editor of The Daily Telegraph and publisher of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. 

He joins the ranks of CNN chief Mark Thompson, Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker, Associated Press chief executive Daisy Veerasingham, Bloomberg News editor John Micklethwait and New York Post editor Keith Poole — all British-born. This week, The Daily Beast replaced editor Tracy Connor with another British import: Hugh Dougherty.

The trend has puzzled some US media observers.

“I do think that there’s something special about American journalism and democracy because we have this ethos that is formed in part by the First Amendment. The country has a very special relationship with the press,” said Margaret Sullivan, a former Washington Post columnist who runs a journalism ethics centre at Columbia University. “That’s not to say that individual people are not good choices. But the trend is hard to understand.”

Lewis this week unveiled the final part of his plan to turn around the Post, which billionaire Jeff Bezos acquired for $250mn more than a decade ago. 

Lewis stressed the urgency of reviving a newspaper that still talks with pride about its role in the Watergate scandal five decades ago. 

He did not mince his words in a 40-minute meeting with staff, saying it would be “nuts” not to change a business that lost $77mn last year. He has replaced Buzbee, its first female executive editor, with Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal.

Lewis believed it “takes an outsider to see what needs to be done”, said one person familiar with his thinking.

The outsider has already been greeted by harsh scrutiny. Lewis’s time on Fleet Street included a period helping Murdoch’s UK empire respond to a phone-hacking scandal that is still being litigated in that country’s courts. In the weeks before Buzbee’s exit, Lewis clashed with her about publishing a story about him being included in the legal case, according to a New York Times report on Wednesday.

Lewis declined to comment and Buzbee could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lewis plans to add products and services to engage the Post’s core readership — the people who pay for a monthly subscription — while expanding its efforts to lure younger readers who are less likely to sign up for a costly long-term subscription. “It requires different sorts of journalism to the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations,” said the person familiar with his thinking.

Lewis plans to split the Post into three newsrooms: one for core news, another for opinion, and a third focused on “social media journalism”.

After November’s US presidential election, the effort will be led by another former colleague, Telegraph deputy editor Rob Winnett. He is closely linked with the 2009 coverage of an expenses scandal among British MPs that was based on evidence paid for by the newspaper. Lewis, Winnett’s then boss signed off the payment — reportedly £110,000 — a practice barred by most US newspapers.

Lewis had already hired Karl Wells, another Briton and former colleague, as the Post’s chief growth officer. 

The appointments raised eyebrows inside the Post. “The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies . . . and now we have four white men running three newsrooms,” said senior political correspondent Ashley Parker, according to reports of the meeting.

While Lewis’s words rattled the Post newsroom, the tone will be familiar to anyone who has worked at a British newspaper. Blunt words and savage autopsies over the day’s coverage in news meetings were common when Lewis and Winnett were forging their careers.

Some executives compare Lewis’s actions with those of Tucker, whose glass-walled office was last month covered with Post-it notes as Wall Street Journal staff protested against job cuts and restructurings. Both Tucker and Lewis previously worked for the Financial Times. 

The outsized presence of Britons at the top of US media is, in part, a reflection of Murdoch’s habit of moving editors around his News Corp publishing empire, which stretches across the UK, US and Australia.

But the playbook of bringing in a British heavy-hitter to revive a once-dominant title, such as the Post, was established a few blocks away from Murdoch’s titles in Manhattan — at The New York Times. 

In 2012 the NYT brought in former BBC boss Mark Thompson. In his eight years as chief executive, he was credited with steering a digital transformation that has made the paper a staggering exception to its industry’s malaise. It was “a good case study that other media owners are hoping to follow”, said Claire Enders, a US-born media analyst based in the UK.

Former colleagues of Lewis and Winnett say both men know how to run a news operation. One said any clashes with their US staff would be less about “the politicisation of news” and more “over the speed at which news is produced”.

“British newspapers are leaner than US ones, and I suspect Winnett will try to bring some of that clarity and directness to news management,” said a former colleague. “He’s been in the trenches himself.” 

But media executives who have made the jump from the UK to the US say that it is not always easy. Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown told the FT last year that it “was very tough at first because I didn’t know America”.

“The first eight or nine issues [of Vanity Fair] were mostly British; I was still in my sort of English mindset. And then I just realised the scope and expanse of America was a wholly different canvas,” she said. 

This generation’s British invasion comes at a more tumultuous time for the industry. While US news groups enjoyed booming readership and revenue during the 2016 and 2020 elections, they have yet to see much of a “Trump bump” this time around.

Instead, publishers are struggling for survival as they face a storm of challenges: a weak advertising market, declining audiences, the threat of artificial intelligence and waning interest from tech groups such as Facebook that had been paying for news content.

The Post has struggled to hold on to the subscribers it gained during Trump’s initial rise. Its audiences have shrunk substantially since 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s re-election bid kept Americans glued to the news. The Post’s website drew 132mn visitors in May, down from 243mn at the same time in 2020, according to Similarweb data.  

One media executive close to several of the cohort of British bosses said: “If the good times were still running then they wouldn’t be here.”

They added: “Would Britons put up with Americans running all their newspapers? Absolutely not. And it is to the credit of America that outsiders are allowed in and made welcome.”