Katharine Weymouth

Katharine Weymouth
Katharine Weymouth photographed by Christopher Michel in 2014

Katharine Bouchage Weymouth (b. 1966) is the former publisher of The Washington Post and chief executive officer of Washington Post Media. She resigned effective Oct. 1, 2014, one year after Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos took over ownership of the newspaper company.

Weymouth grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City and attended The Brearley School, Harvard College/Radcliffe College, Oxford University, and Stanford Law School.

While an associate at Williams & Connolly, a prominent law firm in Washington, D.C., Weymouth went to work as an assistant counsel of the Post in 1996. She later became the head of advertising. Weymouth was named publisher of the Post and chief executive officer of Washington Post Media on 7 February 2008, succeeding Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr.

Among her first actions as publisher was hiring Marcus Brauchli as executive editor and placing him in charge of both newspaper and the website (the previous editor had not been in charge of the website). The hire from outside the organization "surprised the newsroom. ... Brauchli ... had accepted a large payout and resigned from his previous job, running The Wall Street Journal under its new owner, Rupert Murdoch", as a 2012 Times account put it. The 2012 account outlined signs and reports that more recently her relationship with Brauchli may have "cooled" and noted that Raju Narisetti, whom Brauchli had brought with him from the Journal as a close partner "in the digital reinvention of the newsroom", had left the Post in January. However, the Times also said that "[b]y one important measure, The Post’s efforts are paying off. Recently, it has averaged 19.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, making it the second-most-visited American newspaper Web site, behind that of The New York Times."