With widespread layoffs anticipated at The Washington Post within the coming weeks, groups of reporters are sending impassioned letters to proprietor Jeff Bezos, urging him not to shrink the newsroom.
In a letter obtained by NCS, the newspaper’s White House reporters banded collectively to defend a number of the desks going through main cutbacks.
“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,” bureau chief Matt Viser wrote in one of many Post’s inside Slack channels on Thursday morning.
The accompanying letter, signed by Viser and all seven different White House reporters, makes the case for a “diversified Washington Post.” And it tries to communicate Bezos’s language, interesting to him with information and a willpower to develop the Post.
“In a typical month,” the letter mentioned, “some of us have found that more than half of the new subscribers we brought to The Post came from stories and scoops that relied on desks such as International and Metro.”
Those tales included latest scoops in regards to the US army motion in Venezuela and President Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.
“Our colleagues’ work helps lift up our own,” the reporters wrote.
A spokesperson for The Post declined remark to NCS in regards to the looming layoffs.
The uncommon public pleas to Bezos have come after a number of personal alerts about imminent cuts, together with an inside memo saying the Post not deliberate to ship any reporters to the Winter Olympics in February.
Reporters worry that the Post is slashing its means to irrelevance; furthermore, they ponder whether Bezos, who purchased the publication greater than a decade in the past, cares about it anymore.
Thus, the staffers are going over the top of the Post’s writer, Will Lewis, and making an attempt to get Bezos’s consideration instantly.
International correspondents, anticipating reductions to their ranks, wrote to Bezos final weekend and mentioned “robust, powerful foreign coverage is essential to the Washington Post’s brand and its future success in whatever form the paper takes moving forward.”
A second letter, from greater than two dozen DC-area beat reporters, emphasised the significance of native protection. “Should you allow Post management to lay off the local staff, which has been cut in half in the last five years, the effect on this region and the people in it will be immeasurable,” the reporters wrote.
The new letter from the White House reporters is a bit completely different as a result of there is no such thing as a indication that their jobs are in danger.
Instead, Lewis has spoken privately about focusing the Post’s funding on politics and some different key areas, whereas reducing again in areas like sports activities and international affairs.
“But some of our most impactful, most-read articles… have relied on collaboration with all corners of the newsroom,” the White House reporters informed Bezos.
After a number of tumultuous years and former rounds of employees reductions, reporters who’ve stayed on the Post, even when supplied buyout alternatives to depart, say the employees is at a breaking level.
“There’s now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post,” one veteran correspondent mentioned.
The individual identified that Bezos made modifications to the Opinion part that price the Post dearly. Bezos axed a deliberate editorial web page endorsement of Kamala Harris in late 2024, main to mass cancellations by involved subscribers, after which introduced a extra Trump-aligned mission for the Opinion pages in early 2025, inflicting much more upheaval.
Bezos and Lewis “drove us into a ditch with their decisions, particularly the reinvention of the Opinion section, costing us hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” the correspondent mentioned. “Now it looks like the staff will pay for it.”