William Lewis

And I say this with profound respect for the incredible work that you and your journalists do.

Wire services don't tend to garner the same media coverage that, say, like a Will Lewis crash and burn or a Chris Licht crash and burn does, or some of the more outsized personalities across the media landscape.

And yet the work you do is and has long been very crucial to the entire infrastructure of the news media itself.

But your business is changing and has changed in profound ways, which is one of the reasons we're talking today.

Yeah

... and Will Lewis, and so it was- it seemed like a good time to leave.

There was a- it was sort of an exodus of a lot of people.

Um, I still have a lot of friends there, and I think things have calmed down for them, too.

I'm very dubious about the business model here.

Meanwhile, back at The Washington Post, they've named, uh, Geoff D'Anafrio as the permanent publisher and CEO, something we anticipated would happen four or five months ago, and say that they're actually starting to turn the ship around, that for the first time in five years, they are going to, at the very least, break even, that they've added 300,000 subscriptions so far this year, and that they are putting the Will Lewis dark age behind them.

I'm pretty dubious about that business model too.

Like, in a way, what you now have is you have The Washington Post, which can't really compete anymore with The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

In fact, sort of back, you know, I wrote Matt a note saying, "Great job.

This is amazing." And two of the people that were involved in your attempted defenestration, uh, fenestration, um, are gone, W- Will Lewis and, uh, Adam.

It's kind of interesting.

Like, I'm, I, I can't tell what's happening there besides your, your ability to, like, cast [laughs] like something.

You gotta give her her job back." [laughs] Of course, the Post really does not wanna do that, but many of the key figures who were involved with her firing are no longer with the paper.

At the time, it was run by publisher Will Lewis, who we've talked about before, was maybe not the greatest publisher over there, if not one of the worst of all time.

Let people decide for themselves.

And Adam O'Neill, who was the head of the opinion section at that time, who has also seen himself the door, um, the two of them, along with the head of HR, had actually had a meeting afterward, we have learned in this arbitration process, in which they talked about how they were very upset about what, about what Karen had written online and decided to move forward with firing her.

Um, our colleague Natalie Korak, uh, has reported that The Washington Post hasn't directly reached out to her leadership, but her lawyers are apparently in contact, John, with, um, with the Post lawyers, and they're gonna have to figure something out.

She has said she would like to go back to her previous position.

And now that Adam O'Neill's no longer there, Will Lewis is no longer there, maybe there's a world.

It seems like there's going to be a world where this happens.

If anything, they're the ones who should feel the guilt and the shame and the awkwardness.

In fact, two of the men who are responsible for the decision, Will Lewis, former publisher, Will Lewis and Adam O'Neill, they've resigned, they've left, resigned, pushed out.

However, they're out and I'm in.

So yeah, man, there's that.