The Washington Post lays off a third of its employees. Editor-in-chief Matt Murray announced this on Wednesday in a Zoom meeting with the entire company. The news editorial team and the foreign editorial staff in particular are being significantly reduced (many correspondents are being eliminated), the sports editorial team and the book editorial team are even being closed down completely. This is a hard blow for a journalistic institution like The Washington Post, which gained international fame after it exposed the Watergate affair in the 1970s.
The main reason for the layoffs is budget cuts. The newspaper lost about $177 million in 2023 and 2024. The crisis was exacerbated by decisions by its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, who bought the newspaper for $250 million in 2013. At his instigation, the newspaper announced in October 2024 that it was withdrawing its support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris just before she took on Republican Donald Trump in the elections.
Bezos also steered the traditionally progressive opinion editorial staff of The Washington Post in a more conservative direction. This did not go down well with the newspaper’s readers and editors, who introduced the motto ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ during Trump’s first term. After Bezos’ controversial decisions, the newspaper lost 250,000 subscribers, which amounts to 10 percent of the total. More than a hundred editors left last year out of dissatisfaction with the direction of the newspaper.
‘More essential role’
Murray acknowledged Wednesday that the layoffs will come as a shock, but said the goal is to ensure the newspaper can grow and prosper again. “It’s about positioning ourselves to play a more essential role in people’s lives in an increasingly competitive and complex media landscape,” Murray said, according to aides who shared his comments anonymously with the Semafor news site after the meeting. According to Murray, political reporting remains the heart of the newspaper, in addition to covering national news.
The changes had been expected for several weeks. Because The Washington Post had recently informed its sports editors who were going to cover the Winter Olympics in Italy that they would not go. After this became news, the newspaper reversed the decision and said it would send a limited number of editors after all. In recent weeks, editors from several newsrooms have sent letters to Bezos in an attempt to change his mind about the mass layoffs. But that was of no avail.
Bezos’ change of course is widely seen as a bow to Trump, who has often been critical of The Washington Post’s reporting. As president, he poses a potential threat to Bezos’ other business interests, especially the cloud computingcompany Amazon Web Services, which has signed contracts worth billions of dollars with the US government. During his first term, Trump accused Bezos’ e-commerce company Amazon of defrauding the Postal Service, after which it lost billions in stock market value.
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