Ruth Marcus, a columnist and editor for The Washington Post’s opinion section, said Monday she was leaving the newspaper after Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher, killed a column she wrote that was critical of the editorial pages’ new direction.
Ms. Marcus announced her resignation in an email to her colleagues at The Post, saying she had arrived at the decision to resign “with immense sadness.”
“I am taking this step, after more than 40 years at The Post, following Will’s decision to spike a column that I wrote expressing concern about the newly announced direction for the section and declined to discuss the decision with me,” Ms. Marcus wrote.
Ms. Marcus is the most prominent writer to leave The Post’s opinion section since Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who owns the paper, changed its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” David Shipley, the section’s editor, resigned as a result of that decision.
Olivia Petersen, a spokeswoman for The Washington Post, said in a statement that the newspaper was “grateful for Ruth’s significant contributions.”
“We respect her decision to leave and wish her the best,” the statement said.
Ms. Marcus declined to comment.
In her email to co-workers, Ms. Marcus enclosed a message she had sent to Mr. Bezos and Mr. Lewis. In the email, she told Mr. Lewis and Mr. Bezos that the shift for the opinion section “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.”
“Will’s decision to not to run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict — something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing — underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she wrote.
Ms. Marcus’s resignation from The Post came on the same day that Matt Murray, the newspaper’s executive editor, laid out his vision for the newsroom in an email to staff members. (The newsroom of The Post operates separately from its opinion department.)
Mr. Murray, who joined the newspaper as its executive editor last year, said in his email that he was separating the production of the print newspaper from the rest of The Post and changing the way its newsroom was organized.
“The Post needs to evolve with reader habits, new opportunities, and technological developments, particularly the smart use of A.I. as it continues to develop and dramatically reshape users’ experiences of news,” Mr. Murray wrote.
The Post’s national desk, an important center of gravity at the newspaper, is being broken up into two departments, with one focusing on politics and government and one on reporting across the United States. Mr. Murray also said each department would have a senior editor focused on audience growth and visuals.
“Text will no longer be a default and length no more a measure of quality,” Mr. Murray wrote.
