“Our single-copy sales are declining by about 10 percent a year, and home delivery is almost flat,” Weymouth tells the Style staff at the April meeting. Responding to a writer who complains that the Post’s front page is often boring to readers who aren’t obsessed with politics and government, she says, “I think the evidence will tell us you’re right. There are days when I look at the front page and think we’ve done a better job, and there are days that I think, You must be kidding me!” The staffers laugh. Weymouth goes on, “There are days on Saturday that I think maybe somebody is trying to not have people buy the paper.”

Those are striking words for a newspaper publisher, whose traditional responsibilities don’t usually include second-guessing the editors on their Page One selections. In the meeting, Weymouth insists she’s not going to bigfoot editors on news judgments. “It wouldn’t be appropriate,” she says. But in her short time on the job, she’s made it clear that she’ll involve herself in all aspects of the operations that define the brand, an approach that’s symbolized by her decision to move the publisher’s office to the fifth-floor newsroom to make herself “accessible”—a highly unorthodox step strongly discouraged by her immediate predecessor, Post Co. vice chairman ­Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., one of Don Graham’s oldest friends from Harvard.

“Bo hates my idea of moving, hates it, and has tried repeatedly to talk me out of it,” Weymouth tells the Style staff. “But I don’t like to be stuffed away in a cubby. I don’t know how many of you have been to the official publisher’s office on the seventh floor. It’s like a dreadful funeral coffin.” Don Graham, who spent much of his early career as a reporter and editor, endorses the move. “Katharine came up on the business side, but she loves the newsroom and the people in it, and by being in the middle of it she’ll learn a lot, and they’ll learn a lot about her,” he says.

One thing they’ve already learned: She has opinions about almost everything. “Do you remember the rural-dentist photo, a month ago or whatever?” she asks the Style staff. “There was that elderly woman with, like, no teeth, dying in bed, and he was treating her? That was a good story, and I’m sorry to be so horrible—I’m hoping it was no one in the room who picked the photo—but there were better photos!

“I went on the website and—not to do a Sam Zell thing—they have the same dentist with a beautiful old-fashioned truck and, no kidding, a dalmatian on the hood!” Zell, the foulmouthed billionaire who recently bought the Tribune Co., appeared in a notorious YouTube video in which he accused a photographer at the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel of “classic journalistic arrogance.” After the photographer argued that if ordinary readers had their way, the paper would carry stories about puppy dogs at the expense of stories about Iraq, Zell responded with a bracing “Fuck you!”

“Sam Zell may be a loon with Tourette’s syndrome,” Weymouth jokes, “but he’s not crazy. To some degree, it is puppies and Iraq.”

Though Weymouth has no journalism experience, the newsroom chatter about her has been positive so far, in part because she seems down-to-earth and decisive at a time when morale is low and apprehensiveness is high. She has moved with surprising speed to exercise the publisher’s prerogative to name her own executive editor. Leonard Downie Jr., who has held that job since 1991, announced his post-Labor Day retirement plans on June 23. Countering stories suggesting the timing of his departure was Weymouth’s idea, not his, he says, “I’m 66 years old, I have a novel being published in January, I have a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

While denying publicly that she was in any hurry to replace Downie, Weymouth nevertheless did little to hide her head-hunting activities. She sounded out nearly a dozen prospects both inside and outside the paper, including current Post managing editor Phil Bennett, New Yorker editor and former Post staff writer David Remnick (who said he wasn’t interested in the job), and two leading outside contenders, New York Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman and former Wall Street Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli, who was ousted from that job by the paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch, this spring.

No other decision Weymouth makes will be riskier or more important, or will reflect more seriously on her leadership. The consequences of a mistake will be dire. As this magazine went to press in late June, Weymouth appeared poised to break with Post tradition and name an outsider. Brauchli was the leading contender. “In my mind, it’s three different qualities,” she told me, about what she was looking for in her own Ben Bradlee. “One is obviously intellectual caliber—the ability to run our newsroom and identify good stories. Two is charisma and leadership…. and the third is the ability to think strategically about the newsroom of the 21st century. There has to be someone who looks around and says, Okay, what are we trying to accomplish? Now we have the Web, we have mobile, we have the Kindle and whatever other devices are going to come up, so what is the best way for us to exist in order to do the best journalism we can do?”