The Washington Post is asserting mass layoffs Wednesday morning, dealing one other huge blow to a storied media firm and a newsroom that has reached a breaking level.
Executive Editor Matt Murray and human sources chief Wayne Connell despatched an e-mail to staffers Wednesday morning instructing staff to “stay home today” however attend an 8:30 a.m. ET assembly by way of Zoom throughout which the Washington Post’s management will announce “significant actions across the company.”
Those actions embody shutting down nearly the whole Sports part, closing the Books part and cancelling the day by day Post Reports podcast, sources on the newspaper mentioned.
One of essentially the most extreme cuts comes within the type of a “restructuring” of the Post’s Metro desk, which covers D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
The Post’s worldwide protection can even be markedly diminished, although some bureaus exterior the US will stay open.
In whole, the cuts account for one-third of the newspaper’s total employees, a supply conversant in the matter mentioned.
Widespread layoffs on the Post have been anticipated for a number of weeks, particularly after management advised employees in an inside memo that they now not deliberate to ship any reporters to the Winter Olympics this month — a choice that was in the end reversed.
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 some different key areas, whereas slicing again in areas like sports activities and overseas affairs.
That prompted groups of reporters to send owner Jeff 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 employees mentioned it is going to be unable to keep up its historical past of excellence in reporting if the Post lays off vital numbers from different information models.
“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 mentioned.
A yr 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 choice led opinion editor David Shipley to exit the corporate.
Bezos’ change got here months after he canceled a deliberate editorial web page endorsement of Kamala Harris in late 2024. That choice led to mass cancellations from subscribers, hurting the Post’s backside line.
Some present and former journalists on the Post have pinned the drastic adjustments and steep cuts on Bezos’ efforts to appease President Donald Trump, given Bezos’ and Amazon’s advanced relationships with the Trump administration.
“Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump,” former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler mentioned in a column earlier this week.
The paper’s former editor, Marty Baron, who retired in 2021, mentioned in a press release 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,” he added. “No one can deny that.”
However, Baron mentioned, “The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.”