On Wednesday, the Washington Post announced mass layoffs across its newsroom, including the entire sports department, ignoring journalists' pleas for billionaire owner Jeff Bezos not to do so.
According to the New York Times, hundreds of journalists in the newsroom could be affected, especially in the newspaper's regional, international and sports departments. Previously in the memo, it was reported that up to 300 editorial staff could be fired. The entire sports department will be eliminated and only a handful of the 45 staff will be transferred to the secretariat. According to an email from executive editor Matt Murray and chief people officer Wayne Connell obtained by CNN, editorial staff were asked to “stay home on Wednesday” and attend a virtual Zoom meeting at 8:30 a.m. ET to talk about “important company-wide changes.” “These steps include significant newsroom cuts, affecting virtually every newsroom,” Murray wrote in a letter to staff obtained by The New York Post, calling the decision a “painful” decision.
With Donald Trump ascending to power for a second term, the liberal newspaper, whose slogan remains “Democracy Shines in the Darkness,” has dramatically changed its focus. Previously unsympathetic to Trump, the owner of the newspaper and Amazon, Joseph Bezos, surprisingly for many, entered the US president's inner circle among super-billionaires, like Musk. “We concluded that the company's structure was rooted in another era when we were the dominant local print product,” the memo to reporters said.
A Washington Post spokesperson confirmed “a significant restructuring across the company.” Mass layoffs had been expected for weeks after the newspaper published a shocking internal memo ending its coverage of the Winter Olympics. And it raises concerns that the athletic department could be eliminated. The newsroom eventually sent four reporters to Italy to cover the Olympics and three more to California to cover the Super Bowl, the American football playoff final, the biggest sporting event of the year in the United States. Meanwhile, staffers continue to be alarmed by reports that the paper's CEO Will Lewis has privately talked about investing in politics and cutting back on foreign policy and sports stories. In a letter to Bezos, which began with the phrase “Dear Jeff,” the journalists tried to appeal to the billionaire using numbers and argued that many of their materials to attract new subscribers required cooperation with international publications and major city governments.
International reporters and more than two dozen journalists in Washington also sent a letter to Bezos urging him to limit layoffs. One WP employee wrote on social media that there were growing concerns that the cuts could be “worse than the dire scenarios envisioned.” Many of the newspaper's journalists applied for jobs elsewhere, trying to leave before the mass layoffs began. Meanwhile, staffers are said to be struggling after years of layoffs and growing distrust of Bezos and Lewis after the paper dropped its endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024 and added more conservative columnists to its opinion section. As a result, opinion editor David Shipley and several liberal columnists left the newsroom. The failure to endorse Harris caused outrage among regular readers, who canceled their subscriptions en masse and hurt the paper's financial performance. Observers said the newspaper had offered stock buybacks to editors by mid-2025, but Wednesday's layoff announcement marked the end of such offers and tighter cost-cutting measures.
