Will Lewis likes sports. He just doesn’t like paying sports journalists.
The Washington Post publisher who presided over the axing of the paper’s sports division was too ashamed to join Wednesday’s conference call to announce the layoff of 300 staffers himself, but apparently didn’t feel too ashamed to walk the red carpet at Thursday evening’s NFL Honors in San Francisco.
Will Lewis was too busy to join the call to tell his staff he’s destroying the @washingtonpost sports department yesterday … but he did have time to walk the red carpet at NFL Honors here in San Francisco today. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/mnCXa8IQqC
— Nicki Jhabvala (@NickiJhabvala) February 6, 2026
Lewis, in his two years in charge of the Post, has completely gutted the storied paper. The most recent cuts not only killed the sports desk but also slashed the publication’s foreign and metro sections dramatically.
There’s a cruel irony to Lewis’s appearance in the Bay Area during Super Bowl week. Usually, a newspaper like the Post would send a handful of reporters to cover the Super Bowl each year. That, of course, isn’t happening this week. Deserving journalists are sitting at home, Post subscribers aren’t getting the quality of coverage they pay for, all the while Will Lewis struts down the red carpet as if his lack of vision for the paper didn’t directly lead to one of the largest mass media layoffs in years.
What’s worse? Lewis clearly doesn’t care. As The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis revealed in his brilliantly reported piece on the killing of the Post‘s sports section, Lewis goes to the Super Bowl every year. He’s a big sports fan. But when he called a meeting with the Post‘s sportswriters during last year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, most expected the boss to lay out a blueprint for what everyone knew was a department in need of guidance. “You thought there would be some articulation of a plan,” one writer told Curtis. Instead, Lewis just wanted to “talk ball.”
“In New Orleans, Post writers who worried the paper was on the ropes found themselves in a conversation about Eagles-Chiefs,” Curtis reported.
One can imagine Lewis is having those same conversations about the Seahawks and Patriots now, only without his own sportswriters.
“Killing the paper’s sports section doesn’t mean missing the Super Bowl. Unbelievable stuff,” Curtis wrote on X.
Killing the paper’s sports section doesn’t mean missing the Super Bowl.
Unbelievable stuff. https://t.co/nrZtkNUDHl
— Bryan Curtis (@bryancurtis) February 6, 2026
Well, we didn’t expect the same guy who chose not to be present when firing one-third of his company to exercise one ounce of self-awareness, did we?
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.