Editor Robert Winnett stands out for his absence of flash in the adventurous world of American papers. Mr. Winnett, the deputy director of The Daily Telegraph, is known for his concentrate on breaking news, earning the name” Rat Boy” for his continuous search for puffs. He is gruff and lower key, more likely to get buried in paperwork at his office than lobbing at a Mayfair team.
Now that Mr. Winnett has taken over one of the most potent and examined positions in American news at a crucial time in the news industry, Mr. Winnett will be in a spotlight that will be difficult to avoid.
His rise is attributable to his long-standing ties to May Lewis, The Post’s chief executive. Mr. Lewis, a Fleet Street sun, mentored Mr. Winnett at The Sunday Times of London and afterwards at The Telegraph, where Mr. Winnett spearheaded a ground-breaking investigation into false costs that resulted in the resignations of numerous American politicians.
However, Mr. Winnett continues to be a little mysterious, both in the elite American media and in the newsroom he will quickly take over. He will appear at The Post after 17 years at The Telegraph, a middle- proper document associated with Britain’s Conservative Party. Some of his previous actions, including paying a six-figure amount to obtain the documents necessary for the expenses investigation, conflict with the more demanding reporting standards adopted by American information organizations.
The Post members declined to make Mr. Winnett available for an interview.
However, interviews with former acquaintances and Fleet Street veterans on Monday revealed a photograph of a scoop-obsessed journalist who loves Chelsea football and hides behind an obstinate reporter who loves strong stories about politicians of all stripes.
” He truly believes in holding energy to accounts, and believes that’s the most crucial task that media exists to do”, said Rosa Prince, the deputy U. K. director of Politico, who worked with Mr. Winnett at The Telegraph. He is” so much more of a news person than someone with particularly strong political views on his own.”
Mr. Winnett took up freelance work during his breaks from college in Oxford because he was so eager to work in journalism. When he started working as a personal finance writer for The Sunday Times of London in 1995, he was still a student.
The business editor there, Mr. Lewis, who had his ambitions in mind, left for The Telegraph and later brought Mr. Winnett with him. Covering Parliament, Mr. Winnett gained a reputation as” a master of spotting the gem in the dust of heavy information”, as a colleague once told The Guardian.
Someone made an enticing offer to the Telegraph offices in 2009. The tipper had access to a small red hard drive with thousands of documents that revealed widespread abuse of legislators ‘ parliamentary expense accounts. Taxpayer funds had been used to pay off personal mortgages and buildouts like moats.
It was a gripping tale with the potential to upend the British political elite. However, when the tipper met with Mr. Winnett at a London wine bar, he demanded payment for the information because it was intended to safeguard his source’s livelihood. This offer was turned down by The Times of London and The Sun, but The Telegraph accepted it.
” We said: ‘ Look, while The Telegraph does n’t pay for stories in this way — we’re not a tabloid newspaper, it’s not something we do — but this is sensational. These people need some insurance. They could lose their careers,'” Mr. Winnett said in” The Disk“, a documentary produced by The Telegraph in 2020 to mark the 10th anniversary of the investigation.
At the time, Mr. Lewis was The Telegraph’s editor in chief. According to the film, when Mr. Winnett and a colleague approached Mr. Lewis with the notion of paying for the documents, they thought he might be persuaded to offer 30, 000 pounds. Instead, Mr. Lewis threw out a higher number: £100, 000. The sum was described as £110,000 by a different Telegraph editor later.
Mr. Lewis defended the payment as being in the public interest. ” The payment thing is a red herring”, he said in the documentary. ” This is one of the most important bits of journalism, if not the most important bit of journalism, in the postwar period. There is n’t a piece of journalism that could possibly have been more powerful for Britain and British society, bringing up such grave wrongdoing and systematic abuse.
Mr. Winnett coordinated every aspect of the investigation, which dominated British media for weeks, ended the political party’s long-running grandees ‘ careers, and received numerous awards. He was promoted to the position of deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph in 2014, eventually overseeing the newspaper’s 24-hour digital news gathering operation.
In a 2010 article in the Telegraph, Mr. Winnett made the headlines about a possible media merger involving Rupert Murdoch, using undercover reporters who posed as cabinet members for Vince Cable, and secretly recorded his unvarnished remarks. Mr. Cable was forced to recuse himself from deciding the merger by the outcry that followed.
Mr. Cable claimed on Monday that he knew Mr. Winnett as a” serious political reporter” but that he did not know whether Mr. Winnett had commissioned the article. A British press regulator later rebuked the articles that featured cover-up reporters.
At The Post, Mr. Winnett is slated to oversee all news coverage involving politics, business, tech, sports, features and investigations. He plans to move from London to Washington. In a memo distributed in The Telegraph’s newsroom, Mr. Winnett described his departure for The Post as” an emotional decision”.
” He’s very much 100 percent dedicated to work, that’s who he is”, said Holly Watt, a London journalist who has worked closely with Mr. Winnett. It was so obvious to those who knew him from the beginning that he would be the newspaper editor.
The New York Times published the first article, The Low-Key British Newshound Taking Control of The Washington Post.
