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Top WaPo Editor Departed Paper After Dust-Up With New CEO Over an Article

Sally Buzbee’s departure came just weeks after a tense meeting with CEO Will Lewis about an article he was likely to be mentioned in, according to a report in The New York Times.

The abrupt exit of executive editor Sally Buzbee from The Washington Post came just weeks after a tense meeting with the company’s new CEO about an article he was likely to be mentioned in, according to a new report in The New York Times. Will Lewis, the executive, was connected to a long-running phone hacking case in the U.K brought by Prince Harry and others that Buzbee’s news team planned to cover—but Lewis told Buzbee to drop the story when she brought it up, the Times reported, citing several people briefed on the meeting. The article later ran and he did not intervene to stop it. The decision to publish the article did not seem to be the primary reason for Buzbee’s departure, given a previous conversation about reassigning her to head up a “third newsroom” within the Post covering social media and service journalism—but the conversation nonetheless “rattled” Buzbee, the Times reported.