The Washington Post laid off about one in three employees across the company Wednesday morning, dealing another big blow to a newsroom that has reached a breaking point.
Post owner Jeff Bezos had no immediate comment about the cutbacks.
Bezos has been pushing the Post’s management team to return the publication to profitability, but many journalists at the paper have criticized his approach and questioned his motives.
WaPo is a once great now terrible newspaper. I regret that I subscribed several years ago. I got a deal that made it cheap. It was not worth even that reduced price. It is a biased, left-wing rag trading on past glories. I don’t even see a path to profitability without a wholesale change of content, and I’m not aware that’s happened.
Employees described the severe 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.
Is there anyone at WaPo who I’d describe as “the best in the biz”? No.
“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.”
No reason it can’t be both. The Post has been hemorrhaging money for several years now.
The legendary former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who retired from the paper in 2021, said in a statement 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.”
Those problems are being addressed. The question is whether it’s sufficient. Unless the tone and tenor of the paper have changed as well, I’m guessing no.