When Robert Winnett was named the new editor of the Washington Post, it made a lot of sense to me. He’s deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, perhaps best known for being the driving force behind the MPs’ expenses investigation. His judgment and energy have been pivotal to making the Telegraph such a strong commercial and editorial success in a world that seems full of newspapers in crisis. The Post is fast turning into one of them which is why Jeff Bezos, its owner, turned to former Telegraph editor Will Lewis as CEO. And why Lewis, in turn, headhunted Winnett.
But one thing I couldn’t quite work out: why would Rob want to take the job? It’s far from clear that the Post’s crisis is recoverable. So why not stay and build on the profitable, growing model he has created with Chris Evans and Allister Heath at the Telegraph papers – with great potential in the US?
Now, it emerges that Winnett isn’t going after all. ‘It is with regret that I share with you that Robert Winnett has withdrawn from the position of editor at the Washington Post,’ Lewis told staff in an email this morning. The warmth of the reaction to this news in the Telegraph newsroom says much about how Winnett is recognised as a journalists’ editor, precisely the kind of guy you want battling at the front during the fight for the future of news.
The Telegraph – like The Spectator – is for sale right now and its financials came out a few days ago: £60 million profit for last year, on turnover of £268 million. When Lewis announced Winnett to Post staff, he had a very different story to tell: that the newspaper was losing more than $1 million a week and that its audience has halved since 2020. Such figures risk massive cuts in the not-too-distant future. My hunch is that the Post staff sensed that the axe was coming and got it into their head that Winnett was the axe-man. If they could stop the British invasion, maybe they’d avoid the axe. So a campaign was launched to smear and stop him. It was astonishing to watch.
There are well-known culture differences in newsrooms in the UK and US. They regard journalism as a profession; we regard it as a trade. They covet Pulitzer awards; we regard gongs as a bit of harmless fun. In Britain, readers are the only judges that matter. Our journalism tends to be profitable; theirs not so much. Time magazine is losing $20 million a year. The LA Times is losing about $35 million a year; the Post is losing almost twice that.
We also see a kind of lawlessness in certain American newspapers with the younger staff are often in open revolt against the management – and each other – in a way that would strike British journalists not just as disloyalty but an act of collective self-harm. When Bari Weiss quit the New York Times she said she described being…
…the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist… My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.
The New Yorker’s David Remnick is one of the most successful magazine editors in America but even he had to cancel an on-stage interview with Steve Bannon after a staff revolt. When Gerry Baker edited the Wall Street Journal he had to answer to an angry staff meeting after asking reporters to avoid the loaded (and misleading) phrase “Muslim-majority countries” when referring to countries affected by Trump’s travel ban. The country list had been inherited from Obama’s list of countries that posed a terrorist risk; not because they were Muslim. But asking reporters for objectivity in an age of hysteria is a career risk, it seems: even for a newspaper editor.
The same hysteria can be seen in the rebellion against Winnett – or, rather, against the unrecognisable caricature of him gleefully painted by the Guardian and the NYT . 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 belatedly add him as a character to this drama was desperate and implausible, but even the Post did so. It sent two reporters to London to try and dig some dirt on their new editor. The New York Times claimed he is nicknamed ‘rat boy’ by colleagues (he isn’t and never has been) but this concoction was reported as fact. The NYT also spoke in shocked tones about the Telegraph’s payment of £110,000 for the disc of MPs’ expenses. Perhaps this is unusual in America, but the scandal here was how a broadsheet newspaper got hold of this goldmine for such a small price.
The MPs’ expenses scandal was historic because of the way Winnett oversaw the investigation and how effectively he investigated every single aspect of the story. The Matt Hancock WhatsApp files was another one of his hit decisions, devoting huge resources in a public service. I’m not sure I can imagine any other newspaper having the inclination or the resources to expose the lockdown story in the way the Telegraph did. Doing so makes enemies of several establishments: Tory, Labour, medical, even media. Winnett cares about none of that. To him (and the Daily Telegraph) journalism is not fighting on the right side of a divide or playing nice with the right people. It’s about serving readers – and the public’s right to know.
And this is what was so wrong-headed about Post staff complaining that Winnett was not of their ‘culture’. In the Watergate days, this is what it did best: fearless, politically-neutral investigations. But when it went down the ‘democracy dies in darkness’ route in 2017, positioning itself an anti-Trump political project, it chose another road. This more partisan strategy, I’d argue, was at odds with its traditions. Hiring Winnett would have marked a return to those roots of serving readers, regardless of political orientation. Following the truth, no matter who that upsets.
Winnett believes in holding power to account and that very much includes the Conservative government. The idea of the newspaper being the ‘Torygraph’ is now laughably out of date. Recently, I’ve had to explain to people who think the Telegraph is somehow positioning itself to back Reform UK that its coverage is designed not to serve any political agenda but to serve readers: reflecting their exasperation with the Tories and reporting the news rather than banging the drum or saving the blushes of any politician or party. This closeness to the readers helps explain why the Telegraph is profitable. There is no future in partisan journalism.
When Lewis first announced Winett’s appointment to the Post newsroom, he was asked by one reporter whether ‘any women or people of colour were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions’. This was met with applause. ‘People are not reading your stuff’, he told them at that meeting: ‘I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.’
That’s a fair description of Winnett. Chris Evans, the Telegraph editor, neatly summed it up well in an email to staff: ‘their loss is our gain’. As a Telegraph columnist, I’m delighted. As a subscriber to and admirer of the Washington Post, I commiserate – and wish them luck. It sounds like they’ll need it.
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