The two new editors tapped by Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis to oversee a restructuring of the news organization have decades of experience overseeing ambitious, aggressive journalism.
Matt Murray, 58, is the better known in U.S. media circles, having spent 29 years at the Wall Street Journal, the last five as editor in chief before leaving in 2023.
Robert Winnett, 47, deputy editor of Telegraph Media Group, has spent his career in Britain and remains relatively unknown in the United States.
Murray, in particular, was hailed by former Journal colleagues for his deep involvement in stories.
“He always had our back in investigations, and he was one of our biggest champions,” said James V. Grimaldi, an investigative reporter for the Journal (and former Post reporter). “He’s a smart, thoughtful, brilliant editor with superb judgment when it comes to making tough calls on important stories, and has impeccable ethics and standards.”
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A native of Bethesda, Md., Murray edited his high school newspaper before studying journalism at Northwestern University. He was a copy editor in Virginia and covered crime in Chicago before joining the Journal’s Pittsburgh bureau in 1994. After reporting on the banking industry, he rose through the managerial ranks.
“He will circulate through the room and want to know what you’re working on,” said one Journal staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. “He wants to get to the point.”
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Gerald F. Seib, who worked closely with Murray as the Journal’s Washington bureau chief, described him as “a calming influence” during tumultuous periods in the newsroom.
“He’s a genuinely nice person. He asks about your family, he asks about your kids,” Seib added. “He’s not a yeller, he’s not a thrower, he’s a surprisingly normal person.”
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In 1999, Murray published a memoir about his father’s decision to retire from his government career to enter a Benedictine monastery. “I really felt like my family imploded in many ways,” he said in a 2020 interview. But “writing the book helped me think more deeply about the history and patterns of my family.”
After the Journal published a successful 2021 investigation that found widespread conflicts of interest among federal judges, Murray urged the staff to survey the financial disclosures of all federal employees. The resulting series, “Capital Assets,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023.
“He’s willing to propose, initiate, back and fund very ambitious journalism,” Grimaldi said. “You can’t ask for more in an editor.”
Under Murray, the Journal also attracted attention for its reporting on the origins of the coronavirus, including questions about whether it leaked out of a Chinese laboratory. “Our goal was and always is to simply ask questions and see what we can find out and follow the facts,” Murray told The Post in 2021. “We were always open-minded in trying to follow the thread on the origins of the virus.”
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He added that journalists can sometimes be too reliant on experts. “You always as a journalist have to be open to new evidence, open to new voices, and open to things you think might contradict what you think is the truth,” Murray said.
Though he comes from a traditional reporting background, he has embraced new mediums and new technologies since leaving the Journal — experiences that could serve him well as he oversees The Post’s efforts to find new ways of reaching readers and subscribers. He served as a senior consultant to the publication’s parent company, focusing mostly on AI technologies. In a recent post for a Substack newsletter, Murray wrote that all corporate reporters should be asking companies how they plan to invest in and incorporate AI.
“A million stories are waiting to be told beyond AI speculation and novelty,” he wrote.
Winnett has worked for nearly 17 years at the Daily Telegraph — the last decade as deputy editor — where he was initially hired from the Sunday Times by Lewis, who was then the newspaper’s editor.
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In interviews with several colleagues at the Telegraph, Winnett — known as “Rob” — was described as a casual dresser with a cheeky smile, a sometimes shy character who nonetheless could be a “terrier” on a story.
Post employees “have nothing to be frightened of,” said one journalist who has worked with Winnett. “Everyone will enjoy having him as a boss and see his qualities very quickly.”
At the Sunday Times, Winnett earned kudos for his role in an investigation into the “cash for honors” scandal — a story about the connections between political donations and “life peerages” that give individuals the right to sit in the House of Lords. He also played a pivotal role in the Telegraph’s investigation into the misuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament, a series that rocked Britain’s political establishment.
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The latter scoop drew some criticism as “checkbook journalism” — the paper reportedly paid more than $100,000 for a computer disk taken from a parliamentary fees office. But the investigation, based on analysis of millions of data entries, was a blockbuster that prompted the resignation of several officials.
More recently, Winnett has overseen a leak to the Telegraph of more than 100,000 private WhatsApp messages between government ministers at the height of the covid-19 pandemic.
Tom Rowley, a former journalist who worked for Winnett at the Telegraph, called him a “Zen-like figure” who was “quiet, quite shy and unflappable — there were definitely louder voices in the newsroom. I never in my years there heard Rob raise his voice or anything. He always seemed calm and collected.” But that calmness, Rowley said, coexisted with “a great impatience and drive.”
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“I don’t think it matters what the area of coverage is,” Rowley said. “He will want it to be splashy, have impact, be the best it can be.”
While other senior editors came and went with high frequency, “Rob was the constant, marshaling troops, turning out daily news.”
Rowley said his abiding memory of Winnett was him sitting in the center of the newsroom, “leaning way back in his chair, circling the 10th paragraph of a story in the Financial Times to follow up on. He’s very detailed, the power behind the throne, rather than the frontman.”
