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Welcome back to In the Room. In tonight’s email, news and notes on the impending arrival of new Washington Post editor Rob Winnett, the Fleet Street veteran who, in the wake of the Lewis-Buzbee imbroglio, has become the new focal point of newsroom angst.
But first…
⛰️ Paramount’s biggest problem: For you Paramount watchers at S.V.B. and the Polo Lounge, my colleague Matt Belloni had an excellent new column out last night that pinpoints the real source of the company’s problem: Shari. “By putting the company up for sale, negotiating publicly for six months, and nuking a fully negotiated deal at the goal line, it’s Shari who has likely set Paramount on a downward spiral of chaos and uncertainty,” Matt writes. “Weak companies that call off transformative transactions at the last minute generally don’t get better in the aftermath.”
✂️ The coming CNN cuts: On Wednesday, I reported that CNN will endure more layoffs in the months ahead, and that department leaders have already been asked to submit names of staffers who might potentially be cut. Despite a spokesperson telling me that “no final decisions have been made,” I’m now told the layoffs are likely to be more significant than I’d perhaps appreciated (even if they happen incrementally, rather than all at once). Of course, CNN has already winnowed considerably over the last decade: from north of 4,200 employees during the Zucker era to under 3,500 today.
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What About Rob? |
Two weeks into The Washington Post’s nervous breakdown, Will Lewis’s time in the barrel may be ending. Rob Winnett’s turn may be just beginning. |
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In two months, Telegraph deputy editor Rob Winnett will leave London, where he has spent a lifetime burnishing his credentials as a tireless, scoop-hungry journalist, and move to America to become top editor of The Washington Post—the head of the paper’s “first newsroom” in evolving Post parlance. In media circles on his side of the pond, this is seen as significant news. Winnett, after all, is a minor legend on Fleet Street—a soft-spoken but ruthlessly determined newsman who led The Telegraph’s explosive investigation into the U.K. parliamentary expenses scandal and earned the sobriquet “Rat Boy” along the way. “He is highly regarded and thought of as the engine in the newsroom,” one veteran British media executive told me. For The Telegraph, this person said, “it is a big loss.” |
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On this side of the pond, however, Winnett’s impending arrival is a source of considerable anxiety. Two weeks ago, of course, Post publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis was forced to rush out the news of Winnett’s appointment after executive editor Sally Buzbee determined that she’d rather resign than be reassigned to Lewis’s infamous “third newsroom,” focused on growing the Post’s digital audience through service journalism and social media. The Buzbee departure set off a rollicking media storm of epic proportions—“sugarcoat-it”-gate; the Times smoke bombs; renewed anxieties about Lewis’s role in the aftermath of News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal; the Folkenflik sideshow; etcetera. And as the Post newsroom turned against their new C.E.O., Winnett became the new object of collective obsession.
Winnett, of course, doesn’t appear to be cut from the same cloth as Bradlee or Baron. He is Lewis’s longtime protégé—the two worked together at the Sunday Times of London and then The Telegraph. (Lewis was the editor of the paper during the expenses scandal.) Given the suddenly renewed scrutiny over Lewis’s adjacency to the phone-hacking scandal, many Posties feared that the new leadership might portend an incursion of controversial Fleet Street ethics into the proudly reputable House of Woodward and Bernstein. |
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Unsurprisingly, given the sturm und drang surrounding Lewis, inquiries into Winnett and his Fleet Street practices have become something of a subgenre on the media beat. These focus on the fact that Lewis and Winnett’s Telegraph paid more than £100,000 for the documents that exposed the parliamentary expenses scandal, ultimately forcing the speaker of the House of Commons and six members of Parliament to resign. Lewis would later call the payment “a red herring,” since their reporting exposed “profound wrongdoing and systematic abuse.”
Other reports have highlighted TheTelegraph’s practice of sending reporters into cabinet offices, posing as temps or constituents, to ferret out confidential information or unsavory quotes. (This is how TheTelegraph exposed minister Vince Cable’s critical remarks about Rupert Murdoch, for whom Lewis would later work.) Critical coverage of Lewis and Winnett’s past practices, as well as Lewis’s efforts to re-establish trust with his newsroom, have become especially noticeable at Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles’ Daily Beast.
One question that has yet to receive quite as much scrutiny is the matter of TheTelegraph’s politics. Winnett seems to relish tough coverage of politicians no matter their stripe. But the paper itself is, of course, a Tory broadsheet, and in recent years it has tacked harder and harder to the right. It’s also been very profitable, I’m told, on course to make around £65 million this year, or about $80 million. Indeed, Jeff Zucker spent considerable time trying to acquire the paper, along with The Spectator, although the deal eventually fell apart. |
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In any event, this is all a uniquely awkward situation in which to start a new job. “Can you imagine what Rob is thinking reading all this?” one Post source asked me the other day. Meanwhile, his boss and leading supporter is performing his own choreographed listening tour through the newsroom to essentially beg forgiveness for the near coup that his executive shuffle helped foment.
During these tours, Posties have expressed their fulsome anxieties and questions about Winnett—these are journalists, after all—which Lewis has tried to assuage. In one meeting earlier this week, Lewis told staff that Winnett would spend his first two months embedding with reporters, in Washington and on the campaign trail, before officially taking the reins of the newsroom after the election. At that point, the very well-liked interim editor Matt Murray will become head of the aforementioned “third newsroom.” (This being the charitable industry it is, some of Murray’s old colleagues are already second-guessing how he will fare in a role he largely overlooked at his old stomping grounds.)
Epic convulsions, in some ways, are part of the Post’s recent DNA, and they certainly dotted the waning years of the Fred Ryan era. What’s become clear in the past week, however, is that Lewis isn’t going anywhere. As I noted last week, Jeff Bezos would never evict his C.E.O. for invoking, however clumsily, a plan that he had personally approved. Meanwhile, Axios reported this week that Lewis was laying down roots in the form of a stately $7 million place in Georgetown.
When all of this was first going down, one media executive reached out to me with the suggestion that the Post’s top talent would now be flight risks. It seemed reasonable, but at the same time, if they had wanted to leave for the Times or CNN or whatever, they likely would have already done so after the Ryan town hall or some other micro-scandal. Instead, I surmised, the Posties seem to be digging in. Like him or not, Winnett will be one of theirs soon enough. |
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FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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The Doug Bug |
A close look at Mar-a-Lago’s veepstakes calculation. |
TARA PALMERI |
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