On one of his first trips as publisher of the Washington Post, Will Lewis rubbed elbows in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting with the likes of Elon Musk, John Kerry, and his then-executive editor Sally Buzbee.

The January excursion was an auspicious start for the leaders of one of the country’s legacy newspapers: Lewis, a charming Brit, and Buzbee, a Kansas native who spent 30 years at the Associated Press before becoming the first woman to lead the Post’s editorial operation.

But the honeymoon phase was short. By June, the relationship between the British media executive and the competent old-school newsroom leader crumbled. Lewis shoved Buzbee out the door after reportedly trying twice to convince her not to publish stories about his own alleged role in a London phone-hacking scandal.

“I would have preferred to stay to help us get through this period, but it just got to the point where it wasn’t possible,” Buzbee told her team of editors after Lewis announced her resignation on Sunday, June 2, according to the New York Times.

In the days that followed Buzbee’s ouster, circumstances have only gotten worse for Lewis. The Post’s publisher and CEO has found himself on the losing end of news stories throughout the past week that pull back the curtain on some of his unethical behavior. The revelations—a quid pro quo offer to an NPR journalist, on top of his attempts to quash critical coverage of himself in his own newspaper—have media observers and reporters speculating about whether Lewis is long for this job.

Politico media columnist (and former WCP editor) Jack Shafer writes that the recent reporting about Lewis’ bumbling attempts to spike critical coverage of himself has sufficiently marred his credibility and are, at the very least, enough to force Jeff Bezos to reconsider his employment.

“He can’t very well put out the business fire that is consuming the Washington Post … if his own pants are aflame,” Shafer writes. “Will Post owner Jeff Bezos want to keep a publisher who is beset with a fast-growing credibility crisis?”

Former Post media reporter Paul Farhi similarly writes for the Daily Beast that Lewis has used up strikes one, two, and three. “Nobody wants to work for an untrustworthy publisher,” Farhi writes.

As he works to solidify his hold on the Post, Lewis is also carefully tending his image. Lewis has hired Londoner Elsa Makouezi as his office’s head of communications—undermining the outlet’s two other public relations staffers.

“Time for some humility from me,” Lewis wrote in a note to the newsroom last week. “I need to improve how well I listen and how well I communicate so that we all agree more clearly where urgent improvements are needed and why.”

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In December, Makouezi led negotiations with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, promising exclusive access to Lewis in exchange for not publishing anything on the British tabloid hacking story. NPR ran the story anyway; and Folkenflik reported the quid pro quo offer last week. Makouezi hasn’t responded to requests for comment, nor has the Post’s other media relations team, other than sending email with links to news stories.

The phone-hacking allegations clearly touch a nerve with Lewis. After news broke of the quid pro quo, he dug his hole even deeper by disparaging Folkenflik as an “activist” who “dusted down” old allegations.

Meanwhile, Lewis is also trying to execute on his promised “Build It, Fix It” initiative to turn around a newsroom that has seen readership drop by 50 percent since 2020, and, according to Lewis, lost $77 million in revenue last year. Barely six months into the job, Lewis has already lost some allies within the Post, even as he continues to hire more Brits to help him turn the paper around.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, believes Lewis should apologize to Folkenflik for the activist criticism and for dismissing his book about media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

“The question is has Lewis lost the newsroom? When you lose the newsroom in a news organization, that’s a serious matter,” Rosen says. “It very often leads to the ending of your editorship. [Lewis] has to prove that he understands the Post newsroom, that he understands the culture of the newsroom and what is important to the people who work there.”

City Paper has been talking with Post reporters since January about Lewis and his plan to turn the paper around. While there’s a fair amount of frustration over the way some of the big structural changes to the newsroom have been announced, most of the staff to speak with City Paper are trying to remain optimistic about the future.

“This was a tumultuous rollout and obviously not ideal, but at the base we are rooting for his plan to succeed and eager to be enlisted to help execute it,” says Carol Leonnig, a national investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner. “Everyone I talk to is all-hands-on-deck, but obviously we are all journalists who are going to kick the tires and ask hard questions along the way.”

The Post’s union has not responded to a request for comment, but the Guild reportedly has written to Lewis asking for more information about Buzbee’s dismissal, about the stories detailing his efforts to censor bad publicity (and his denials of those details), and his role in the British hacking scandal.

(In the U.K., it is much more common for journalists to pay sources for stories, whereas most reputable news organizations in the United States consider the practice highly unethical.)

Between 2005 and 2007, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in London hacked phone records to publish sensitive, private information on politicians, celebrities, and others. When the scandal came to light, a national inquiry examined not just the actions of Murdoch’s newspaper but British journalism ethics more broadly.

Lewis had a top-level job working for the Murdoch corporate media empire at the time. In London court filings, he is accused of leading a cover-up of illegal phone hacking. Prince Harry and Hugh Grant were among the victims. Lewis was not a named defendant in the court case, and he has denied wrongdoing.

But he has also refused to talk about his role in the scandal—either to reporters or to his own staff. (A newspaper publisher typically does not exert influence over what the paper publishes or pressure their journalists to shape coverage in any way.)

Yet Lewis clashed with Buzbee last week and reportedly also argued with her back in March over the same issue. He didn’t want the Post printing anything about his role in the hacking scandal. When Buzbee did not bend to his demand, he accused her of showing “a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation,” the New York Times reports.

In the hours after the Post published a story updating readers on the hacking scandal, the paper’s director of newsletter strategy Elana Zak instructed deputy editors not to promote the story via newsletter, according to an email obtained by Semafor.

“Please do not put this Prince Harry story in any of your newsletters,” Zak wrote in the email. She did not return emails or calls seeking comment.

Buzbee has not publicly commented on her dismissal or the reported clashes with Lewis. According to Axios, former interim Post CEO and Bezos confidante Patty Stonesifer is throwing a party for Buzbee later this month. The guest list is expected to be heavy on women executives—a potential nod to the fact that Buzbee was replaced by two of Lewis’ White male former colleagues. Citing unnamed sources, Axios reports that the outlet’s two top women editors, Matea Gold and Krissah Thompson, were not considered to be Buzbee’s replacement.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Lewis’ efforts to patch over the phone-hacking scandal, the story recently has gotten more coverage from a wide variety of outlets. So has the fact that Lewis has now brought in Matt Murray, another former Murdoch editor, to lead the newsroom.

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In recent months, Lewis has installed other Brits in top positions at the Post. Lewis quietly hired New York-based media businessperson and fellow countryman Karl Wells in January to serve as chief growth officer. Wells worked for the Sun, a British tabloid, and the Times before going to work for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, where he worked directly with Lewis. According to the announcement about his hiring, Wells will remain in New York—an allowance that would have been unthinkable in the old days under editor Ben Bradlee when the fabric of the DMV was an intrinsic part of the newspaper.

Lewis also hired Suzi Watford to serve as chief strategy officer. Watford spent more than 20 years working for Murdoch before she was hired by the Post this spring. She attended the University of Surrey and also worked at the Telegraph and the Times (of London) and was recruited by Lewis to work with him under Murdoch.

Lewis announced that Murray, former WSJ editor in chief, would take over for Buzbee and remain in the job through the election in November. Then Murray will transition to a brand-new role at the paper focused on video storytelling and service journalism—including flexible payment methods and a heavy reliance on embracing artificial intelligence to help share news, according to the Post.

Robert Winnett, who also worked alongside Lewis at the British Daily Telegraph, will then take over for Murray as the Post’s top editor. He is largely unknown in U.S. news circles; in Britain his coworkers gave him the nickname “rat boy,” a reference to his tendency to use some less-than-scrupulous reporting methods. In one example, recently reported by the Daily Beast, Winnett sent a junior reporter undercover into the U.K.’s Cabinet Office to leak government documents. (The reporter, Claire Newell, was arrested but never prosecuted.)

In his new role, Winnett will be in charge of the core newsroom but also of building a suite of news offerings for subscribers: Pro Post and Pro Plus. To help lead that effort, the Post announced in May the hiring of Martin Kady, who worked at Politico for 16 years and led its subscription news offering before working for a time at news start-up the Messenger, which folded after less than a year.

Along with Murray and Winnett, Editorial Page Editor David Shipley leads the other major arm of the Post newsroom. Shipley, who worked at Bloomberg for many years, now oversees the Post’s opinion section. That means that all three of the Post’s top editors are middle-aged White men—a fact not lost on staffers who have pressed Lewis on the lack of diversity in the upper ranks.

“The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies,” political correspondent Ashley Parker told Lewis during an all-staff meeting, according to multiple accounts. “And now we have four white men running three newsrooms.” She declined to comment further to City Paper.

Until Buzbee’s exit, Lewis appeared to be getting the benefit of the doubt from many in the Post newsroom. One national reporter tells City Paper he appreciated how personable and engaging Lewis was—it reminded this reporter of Bradlee or former publisher Don Graham, who was known for sending little notes of appreciation to the news staff when he read something that struck a chord with him.

“Will was seen as the personable one who would send cheerful notes to reporters about their stories—in a homage to the ‘Donnie Grams’ of yesteryear—while Sally was the aloof one,” this reporter says. But now, Lewis has “managed to completely flip that script around,” they say.

Correction: This article incorrectly reported that Matt Murray is British. This version has been corrected.