The Washington Post is considering acquisitions to expand its revenue and subscriptions.
Credit...Graeme Sloan/Sipa, via Associated Press

Washington Post C.E.O. Elevates Deal-Making to a Top Priority

Will Lewis has said he has a mandate from the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to grow the business, including through acquisitions.

by · NY Times

For the last several years, The Washington Post has sat out the deal fervor that has swept through much of the media industry.

The Post’s new chief executive, Will Lewis, appears interested in changing that.

Mr. Lewis, who took over in January, has told confidants that he has a mandate from the company’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to grow the newspaper, including through acquisitions, three people familiar with the matter said. In recent months, the company’s head of corporate development has met with a variety of technology and media companies, exploring deals that could help The Post expand its revenue and subscriptions, one of the people said.

In scouting for deals, The Post is following in the footsteps of other media companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, that have bought companies that complement their core news businesses, the three people said. The overall goal is to create a growing subscription-based business that is insulated from the vagaries of the news cycle, which can wax and wane throughout the year.

Mr. Lewis, who founded The News Movement — a social media-focused publisher aimed at Gen Z — is also said to be interested in acquiring a company that produces video, two of the people said.

In recent months, Peter Elkins-Williams, The Post’s head of partnerships and corporate development, sat down with executives at Punchbowl News, a start-up that has parlayed its obsessive following in the halls of Congress to a robust subscription business and a valuation of more than $100 million, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mr. Elkins-Williams didn’t propose a deal, according to the two people, and The Post has not made an offer since then. But the outreach is a sign of The Post’s resurgent ambitions under Mr. Lewis, the two people said.

An update on the company’s progress was provided to the Post newsroom on Tuesday. During a presentation to employees, the company’s chief growth officer, Karl Wells, showed a slide that indicated the company would look to acquire audiences in areas of coverage that delivered the most new subscribers, including politics and opinion.

“This is about us getting our house in order,” Mr. Wells said, according to two people who were in attendance. “It’s about fixing the foundations in order for us to be able to grow regardless of the news cycle.”

Also during the presentation, Mr. Wells showed employees several improvements the company’s new leaders have made, including adjusting The Post’s paywall to prompt more readers to subscribe. Mr. Wells also said The Post was cracking down on 160,000 free subscriptions offered to federal offices and employees.

“After a period of significant decline in our digital subscription base, we are growing for the first time since 2021,” one slide read. This year through September, The Post added more than 4,000 subscribers.

The Post’s longtime chief executive before Mr. Lewis, Fred Ryan, also considered some acquisitions. The newspaper weighed a deal for Consumer Reports — a decades-old product recommendation publication. It also considered buying Decision Desk, a start-up used by a variety of news organizations to help call races on election night.

But deal-making was never a top priority for Mr. Ryan, and no agreement was reached with either company.

The Post lost roughly $100 million last year and has continued to lose money. It has reduced staff to help stanch the bleeding: Last year, The Post cut 240 positions through buyouts, and in September, Arc XP, a sister company of The Post focused on developing online tools, laid off more than 50 employees.

In addition to pursuing acquisitions, Mr. Lewis has begun to develop other business lines for The Post. The newspaper has created a new product, called WP Intelligence, that plans to lure professionals interested in deeper coverage of their industries. That tactic mirrors a strategy put in place by other Washington publications, such as Politico, Axios and Bloomberg, which sell pricey subscriptions for in-depth coverage to lobbyists and industry experts.

In some ways, The Post’s new strategy is familiar territory for Mr. Lewis, an inveterate deal-maker who has spent much of his career building digital subscription businesses. He was previously the publisher of Dow Jones, where he oversaw business titles including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Dow Jones Newswires.

Mr. Lewis’s efforts to transform The Post come after an internal crisis that sapped much of his good will shortly after arriving in the newsroom. He replaced Sally Buzbee, the newspaper’s former executive editor, after she balked at a plan to create a separate division to oversee new types of journalism at The Post. Before her exit, Ms. Buzbee clashed with Mr. Lewis over whether The Post should cover legal developments involving him in a phone hacking case in Britain.

In recent weeks, Mr. Lewis has boasted in staff memos of periods of high web traffic during the presidential race, including when President Biden announced his decision to abandon his re-election bid. In August, Mr. Lewis told Post staff members in a memo that the newspaper showed subscriber growth over a period of seven weeks for the first time since February 2021.

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