This week, a team of editors at The Washington Post sent a practically funereal note to their staff announcing the regrettable defection of one of their top young political journalists. After “a remarkable, scoop-filled run as a White House reporter,” Tyler Pager had decided to take his talents five blocks west to The New York Times, where he will soon reunite with Matea Gold, the longtime Post managing editor who also migrated to the Times last month after being passed over for the Post’s top editor job. “Tyler’s loss will be keenly felt in the Post newsroom,” the paper’s national editor Phil Rucker wrote, “but we wish him the best in this new phase of his career.” The lavish praise heaped upon Pager, a skilled but modestly accomplished twenty-something reporter, was at once a diplomatic farewell, a genuine expression of loss, and, frankly, a hunger scream from Post institutionalists who have been losing great reporters for years—Fahrenthold, Costa, Leibo in a previous lifetime, ditto Peter Baker—and are now witnessing another alarming post-election exodus. Since last week, when I reported on these impending defections, the Post’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer have left for The Atlantic, star Trump reporter Josh Dawsey is still loose in the saddle and entertaining offers from the paper’s competitors, and a host of other reporters are eyeing the exits. On the opinion side, several editors and columnists have also left the paper. Whatever you make of it, the Post’s brain drain reflects a true inflection point for the storied institution—and a decisive moment for its publisher Will Lewis and his hand-picked executive editor Matt Murray. (As I’ve reported, Lewis has decided to officially anoint Murray as editor, but has yet to announce it.) Lewis’s yearlong tenure has been largely defined by mutual contempt between him and his newsroom, which he rarely visits: He has been audibly impatient with their myopia and aversion to change, at the same time that many reporters lament his brash demeanor and disregard for sacred Post customs, all while quietly suspecting that he doesn’t really have a plan to save the paper. (An alternate theory: He does have a strategy but won’t reveal it for fear of another bout of upheaval. Alas, the outmoded economics of the newsroom businesses requires this unhappy couple to remain married despite seemingly irreconcilable differences.) Now, after naively and consistently thinking that Lewis would be forced to leave for all his sins—the Buzbee slight, the Murdoch stuff, the Folkenflik offense—only his uppermost talent are departing for greener pastures. It’s a shitty situation, and one that was both entirely avoidable and yet nonetheless necessary. I’m not Dr. Phil, but it’s unhealthy to despise your colleagues. Lewis anticipated, and certainly welcomes, some of this post-election turnover, as I’ve noted before. The Post has spent years coddling journalists who were just as responsible for its lackluster editorial product as the editors and operators they blamed for their misfortune. That said, it’s hard to imagine that driving the most notable political reporters out of the building was really part of the plan. Stars like Dawsey and Parker had achieved pseudo-celebrity status in the first Trump term, and might have been poised to recapture that fame in the next. (Although, to be honest, a post-Trump ennui exists at both the Post and the Times. Maybe it’s time for a new generation to take over…) In an early interview with Semafor, Lewis described Scherer as his favorite reporter at the paper (though he also had to search for his name—“red tie, glasses…”—so maybe he was paying a little bit of lip service). Whatever the case, the mass migration of high-profile Posties, coupled with Murray’s whispered coronation, likely marks the end of this highly depressing internal blame game. Bezos won without stepping foot off his yacht, the people who once defined the paper are leaving, and Lewis is now responsible for envisioning the next chapter with a new stable of talent—and with only a few of his apparent nine lives available to him. The challenge, of course, is figuring out how to lure talent to a place that everyone seems to be leaving. And yet, as Posties know well, there is an excess of quality journalists in the market and a paucity of jobs available. Lewis and Bezos may have screwed the pooch and alienated plenty of the building, but they have many macroeconomic trends on their side.