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We have a hunch you might enjoy In the Room, a twice-weekly private email from Puck’s senior media correspondent, Dylan Byers. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Dylan opens his notebook for Puck members as he reports on the biggest stories (and egos) in the industry.
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Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. In tonight’s email, news and notes on the still-ongoing Washington Post tragicomedy, where journalists have successfully dissuaded editor-to-be Rob Winnett from ever setting foot in the newsroom. Is that actually a victory?

But first…

💨 The Deshishku defenestration: When former ABC News president Kim Godwin resigned in early May, I reported that a few members of her inner circle were likely to follow her to the door. Six weeks later, they’ve finally found their way to the exit. Stacia Deshishku, the executive editor, is departing despite some frustrations over her severance (as I reported back then, she’d told colleagues Disney would need to “back up the Brinks truck” in order to dislodge her). Jose Andino, the H.R. chief, is also leaving, as he has intended to do since the day of Godwin’s ouster.

💨 Bad news at the Beast: Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles have lost their Washington bureau chief, Martin Pengelly, just five weeks after bringing him on board. This appears to have been an ill-advised arrangement for both sides. Pengelly clearly clashed with Coles and chafed at her quirky story ideas, as first reported by THR. But it also seems as if Sherwood and Coles didn’t get the kind of high-metabolism editorial leader they were hoping for. In any event, it’s a setback for Sherwood and Coles, who have a long and likely painful row to hoe in terms of restructuring that business.

Most Post staff were aware that the business was suffering—they’d endured the aimless final years of the Fred Ryan administration, the subsequent buyouts, the Buzbee-era general malaise—but they were still wary of Lewis, his strategy, and his swarthy Fleet Street bravado. By that point, Buzbee had also told colleagues about the infamous meetings where, in her telling, Lewis had tried to dissuade her from publishing stories that included accusations about his involvement in a British phone-hacking scandal—a tale that the carrier pigeon would lay on the doorstep of the Times, metastasizing the crisis. (Lewis has denied pressuring Buzbee, and denied any wrongdoing in the hacking affair.) Buzbee’s smoke bomb expertly preyed upon all the Post newsroom’s most delicate triggers—latent concerns about Lewis’s journalistic ethics and his refusal to address questions about the hacking scandal to their satisfaction—and some journalists began to wonder whether the contretemps may have played a role in her resignation.

Within days of Buzbee’s ouster, some Post journalists decided to take matters into their own hands. During a meeting of the foreign desk early that week, led by Post international editor Doug Jehl and his deputy Jennifer Amur, journalists discussed a plan to investigate both Lewis and Winnett to see if they could unearth unflattering information about the two men’s history in the U.K., where they once worked together as journalists at the Sunday Times and The Telegraph. At least one staffer present at the meeting later brought the issue to Lewis’s attention, said it was a shameful reflection on the Post’s own ethics—a hit job masquerading as journalism—and encouraged him to take action. Lewis instead referred the matter to human resources.

The Post journalists’ attempt to investigate their own boss and future editor is their right and privilege—that’s how this business works, even if their work had an emotional agenda. The news media loves to cloak itself in a patina of strenuous nonpartisanship, but it is still the product of human beings. The journalists may have also been motivated by another friction between Lewis and Buzbee. On multiple occasions since becoming publisher and C.E.O., Lewis had expressed concerns over the tone of the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, which he and others inside the paper viewed as having an anti-Israel bias. Lewis had also questioned Buzbee’s apparent reluctance to investigate the financing behind the pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses, which Politico had reported were backed by major Democratic donors. At one point, Buzbee also revealed that her daughter was participating in the protests on her college campus.

In mid-May, the Post reported that a group of Jewish business titans had privately pushed New York City Mayor Eric Adams to send police onto the Columbia University campus to dispel protestors. Adams himself publicly slammed the report as “antisemitic in its core,” and the story also angered some Post insiders who felt that the paper’s coverage had been biased against the Jewish business leaders. In the eyes of some Post journalists, however, the report was less troubling than Lewis’s very discussions with Buzbee over the coverage. To this cohort, this commentary provided further evidence that Lewis, a former top editor, was unduly trying to influence the newsroom. And this feeling may have been particularly acute on the international desk, where several journalists had years of experience working in the Middle East.

At the same time that the international desk held its meeting, the Post’s media desk was already at work covering the mounting scrutiny surrounding their publisher. Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal editor whom Lewis had hired to run the newsroom until Winnett’s arrival—at which point he would go on to run the aforementioned “third newsroom”—had recused himself from the coverage in light of his ties to Lewis. Of course, it was fast becoming clear that the Lewis drama wasn’t going away, and Murray had to determine a more sustainable solution.

In the days that followed, he asked former Post managing editor Cameron Barr, now working with the Post on a freelance basis, to oversee its investigations into both Lewis and Winnett. Barr, who had stepped down after being passed over for the executive editor role that went to Buzbee, would now lead a six-person team from his new home in Skipton, on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England. In a period of a week, the perfectly normal and perhaps even genteel unloading of an unpopular and underperforming editor—whom colleagues whined about publicly and privately—had blossomed into a singular D.C. media scandal: aggrieved journalists, the appearance of impropriety, and a high-minded cause as virtuous as the Post, itself.

Post reporters first reached out to Winnett on Sunday evening to ask him for comment on the story, just a few hours before it was published. Winnett furnished responses to their inquiries to the Post’s P.R. team, which were not included in the Post’s report. Instead, a jarring and startling line in the story stated: “Winnett, currently a deputy editor of The Telegraph, did not respond to a detailed list of questions.” Post comms chief Kathy Baird declined to comment on the matter.

Was the Post P.R. team gravely incompetent? Were they instead quietly manipulating the situation to side with their newsroom, which was by now nakedly trying to nuke not only Winnett but also Lewis—not only by assigning a team of six to a story with zero national import, but also by leaking their inner turmoil to Politico and the Times in an ostensible attempt to ethics-shame Jeff Bezos off his $500 million superyacht in the Mediterranean?

Whatever the case, the Post’s investigation into Winnett ultimately succeeded in dissuading him from taking the job. On Friday morning, Telegraph editor Chris Evans informed staff that Winnett had decided to forgo the Post job and remain in his current post as Telegraph managing editor. “As you all know, he’s a talented chap, and their loss is our gain,” Evans wrote. Lewis later confirmed the news to the Post newsroom, “with regret,” and added that Winnett had his “greatest respect and is an incredibly talented editor and journalist.”

Lewis will now lead the search for a new editor. Murray, who is already installed at the helm of the Post newsroom, and much more well liked than his British contemporaries, may be on the list of candidates. And yet, it’s hard to imagine that Lewis would go through with another search if he was considering quelling this epic shitstorm by elevating an internal candidate. Also, for all his talents, it’s hard to imagine that Murray is capable of transforming the Post as Lewis and Bezos have designed, whatever they plan to do. (And by the way, whatever those plans are, Lewis is surely biting his tongue…)

The ideal candidate for the role, after all, was always Winnett—not just for Lewis, but for his boss, too. Indeed, Bezos had met with Winnett prior to his hiring and signed off on the plan to install him as top editor. Bezos has also made clear that his first goal for the Post is profitability. Coincidentally, while the Post lost $77 million last year, The Telegraph, where Winnett has been described as “the engine of the newsroom,” is on course to make a £65 million profit this year, or about $80 million.

Shortly after the Winnett news broke on Friday, Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, the conservative U.K. weekly and sister publication of The Telegraph, lamented that the Post had foolishly deprived itself of a great editor. “This rebellion against Winnett was not even against him, but an unrecognizable caricature of him,” Nelson wrote. “The hacking scandal was subject to the biggest police investigation in British history with hundreds of people investigated: Winnett was not one of them. Trying to smear him by belatedly adding him as a character to this drama was desperate and implausible, but even the WaPo did so. The New York Times claimed he is nicknamed ‘rat boy’ by colleagues (he isn’t and never has been). The NYT also spoke in shocked tones about the payment of £110,000 for the disc of MPs’ expenses. Perhaps in America, but the scandal here was how a broadsheet newspaper got hold of this goldmine for such a small price.”

Indeed, it’s hard to look back on the recent tumult at the Post and not feel as though, in setting out to save the paper, its reporters inadvertently set it back—which, given the current state of the business, they can hardly afford to do. For all their rage, the Posties seem to have an insufficient understanding of the gravity of their business challenges. The American news media landscape is actually quite oversaturated—between the Times, AP, Reuters, Insider, CNN, Politico, Yahoo, Axios, the Journal, FT, and Bloomberg, it’s hard to see where the Post fits in on any two-by-two grid. And, sure, the Post may be an institution, but it is foremost a business.