The Washington Post tries to solve one of the biggest problems

New York
CNN
—

The Washington Post is trying to fix one of its biggest problems: an outdated homepage that its own staff hates.

The facelift is a key part of Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis’s plan to turn the publication around on behalf of owner Jeff Bezos. This year, the Post is expected to lose about $50 million. That’s an improvement from last year’s $77 million loss, but it’s still an unsatisfactory result.

Lewis is under pressure to win back paying subscribers and return the Post to profitability, a goal he says he is making progress toward. In his weekly memo to Post employees Friday night, Lewis called the updated homepage a “significant step forward.”

Reporters and editors at the news organization have long complained about the dull and dated nature of the Post’s digital front door. Among the frustrations: The home page contained relatively few stories at any given time and lacked a sense of cohesion. Staffers envied the home pages of rivals like The New York Times. Lewis acknowledged this in his memo.

“Many of you expressed your distaste for the previous version,” he wrote. “I agreed and encouraged you to improve it and you did.”

The new version, which launched last week, “is the beginning of several planned improvements,” newly installed editor-in-chief Matt Murray wrote to the newsroom.

The new homepage offers twice as much space for top stories: six slots instead of three. This is a very welcome change.

“The section editors had a hard time getting their stories into those three recommended slots, which led to a lot of frustration,” a Post reporter explained.

As part of the redesign, Opinion articles have also been moved higher up on the page, while some sections such as ‘Helpdesk’ and ‘Technology’ have been removed. Staff said they expect further upgrades in the coming months.

Many people find Post journalism through side doors, such as social media accounts and email newsletters, but the front door has become more important as social networks shut down the traffic hose and Google integrates AI into its search results. More urgently, at the Post, the homepage redesign is a sign that the new management regime is rapidly implementing major changes.

Earlier this summer, the newspaper also launched a new marketing campaign that capitalized on the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” with the tagline “Switch On,” in an effort to boost the paper’s growth.

Lewis was named publisher and CEO in January and has been vocal about the Post’s troubled state. His turnaround strategy was welcomed by many employees, but morale plummeted in the spring as allegations of his involvement in a cover-up of a phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom resurfaced. (He denies wrongdoing.)

Although Lewis has not fully recovered, he has used his weekly memos to promote the progress in rebuilding the Post’s subscriber lists. On Friday, Lewis said, “Last week was our highest net subscription growth week of the year, and this continued growth is due to great teamwork across the company.”

A Post spokesman declined to specify the current number of digital subscribers to the paper. The most recently published total was 2.7 million.