On Wednesday, in the span of an hour, several Washington Post reporters sent me a link to an eye-catching report from NPR: “U.K. police open criminal investigation into Washington Post publisher.” The report had instantly captured the attention of the Post newsroom and, to some extent, the Cafe Milano in-crowd, too: “Probably 20 people in Washington have sent me that story in the last hour, unsolicited,” one Postie told me. For a moment, the piece seemed poised to resuscitate the feverish, monthlong scrutiny that had surrounded Will Lewis, the Post’s C.E.O. and publisher, until June 27, when the Biden–Trump debate upended the U.S. presidential campaign and forced the newsroom to prioritize matters outside its own walls.

Lewis, of course, had entered the Post newsroom last fall as Jeff Bezos and Patty Stonesifer’s hand-picked change agent—a former Fleet Street journalist turned media executive promising to salvage the paper from nearly $100 million in annual losses through some nebulous, to-be-determined digital growth alchemy. And initially, the bold ambition and British charm went over very well. There were some outstanding questions about Lewis’s earlier iteration as an executive at News Corp., where he’d helped clean up Rupert Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal. But most seemed willing to simply trust Bezos’s decision. After all, things couldn’t get much worse than the malaise that had settled on the newsroom in the final year of the Fred Ryan era.