By Brian Stelter, Liam Reilly, NCS
(NCS) — The Washington Post laid off about one in three staff throughout the corporate Wednesday morning, dealing one other huge blow to a newsroom that has reached a breaking level.
Post proprietor Jeff Bezos had no fast remark in regards to the cutbacks.
Bezos has been pushing the Post’s administration workforce to return the publication to profitability, however many journalists on the paper have criticized his strategy and questioned his motives.
“Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump,” former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler stated in a column earlier this week.
Bezos and the corporate he based, Amazon, have advanced relationships with the Trump administration. Earlier this week Bezos hosted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the Bezos-owned Blue Origin rocket firm.
Post staff had been bracing for widespread layoffs for a number of weeks. On Wednesday morning, staffers had been advised to “stay home today” whereas notices had been despatched about who had been laid off.
“These moves include substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments,” govt editor Matt Murray stated in an inside memo.
The impacts embrace dramatically shrinking the Metro desk, shutting down nearly all the Sports part, closing the Books part, and cancelling the day by day “Post Reports” podcast, sources on the newspaper stated.
The Post’s worldwide protection can be being markedly decreased, although some bureaus exterior the US will preserve a “strategic overseas presence,” Murray stated.
Major cuts are additionally being made on the enterprise facet of the Post’s beleaguered operations.
Murray stated “this restructure will help to secure our future in service of our journalistic mission and provide us stability moving forward,” although many staffers heaped skepticism on his declare.
At the Post recently, “it’s just been one funeral after the other,” contributor Sally Quinn, spouse of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, advised NCS’s Pamela Brown Wednesday morning.
Quinn stated of Bezos, “It just seems heartbreaking that he doesn’t feel the paper is important enough to bankroll.”
“They say” the cuts are for the nice of the paper long-term, she added, however “if you don’t have the great reporters, you don’t have any good content, who’s going to want to buy it?”
‘I’m out…’
Employees described the extreme cuts in social media posts Wednesday morning. “I’m out, along with just a ton of the best in the biz. Horrible,” the Post’s Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan wrote on X.
“I’m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post,” race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton wrote. “This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.”
The Post’s writer, Will Lewis, has spoken privately about discovering a path to profitability for the Post by focusing the paper’s funding on politics and a few different key areas, whereas chopping again in areas like sports activities and international affairs.
That discuss prompted groups of reporters to send Bezos impassioned letters that urged him to not shrink the newsroom.
In one letter obtained by NCS, signed by bureau chief Matt Viser and 7 different White House reporters, the staff stated will probably be unable to keep up its historical past of excellence in reporting if the Post lays off vital numbers from different information items.
“If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are,” Viser and the opposite signees stated.
Lewis went forward with the plan.
On Wednesday morning, Murray wrote in a staff-wide memo that “for the immediate future, we will concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact and that resonate with readers: politics, national affairs, people, power and trends; national security in DC and abroad; forces shaping the future including science, health, medicine, technology, climate, and business; journalism that empowers people to take action, from advice to wellness; revelatory investigations; and what’s capturing attention in culture, online, and in daily life.”
‘Among the darkest days’
The legendary former Post govt editor Marty Baron, who retired from the paper in 2021, stated in a assertion that “this ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
“Of course, there were acute business problems that had to be addressed,” Baron wrote. “No one can deny that.”
The Post, like many different American newspapers, has undergone many rounds of cost-cutting over time.
But these challenges “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top,” Baron wrote.
Loyal subscribers “were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron wrote, citing amongst different elements the late 2024 determination by Bezos to spike a deliberate editorial web page endorsement of Kamala Harris.
That determination, although separate from the newsroom’s operations, led to mass cancellations from subscribers, hurting the Post’s backside line.
Baron additionally cited what he known as “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor” with Trump.
A 12 months in the past, Bezos outlined a new vision for the Post’s once-esteemed opinion part, selling libertarian beliefs, together with free markets and private liberties. That determination led opinion editor David Shipley to exit the corporate.
When Baron ran the newsroom, he recalled, Bezos “often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”
The-NCS-Wire
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Andrew Kirell contributed reporting.