Washington Post lays off more than 300 journalists

By Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Eric Wemple

The Washington Post carried out a widespread round of layoffs Wednesday that decimated the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company laid off about 30% of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.

“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles.”

Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying the Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative artificial intelligence, had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that the Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Murray allowed for the possibility that the Post could eventually grow its newsroom again, saying that he didn’t expect this to be “the final end-all-be-all footprint of our newsroom forever.” He said that journalists across various sections would continue to team up on stories, despite warnings from departing employees that the cuts could hobble staff members’ ability to work together.

“We can’t be all things to all people, but I think that kind of collaboration and that kind of work across the newsroom is going to continue and will continue to distinguish our journalism,” Murray said.

The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.

Murray told the staff that while the Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia. In the interview, Murray took responsibility for the cuts, saying they were part of a plan he put together with his team.

Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.

As emails notifying employees that they were laid off began landing in inboxes, journalists at the Post began notifying their colleagues that their positions had been cut. “Eliminated,” "Eliminated,” “Eliminated,” their messages to one another read.

Some of the departures shocked the newsroom, including that of a Ukraine correspondent who was laid off while working in a war zone, and the cutting of all staff photographers. A sports reporter in Italy for the Winter Olympics said that he would keep filing articles despite being laid off.

Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for the Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions. Lewis has experimented with several changes to transform the organization, notably embracing AI to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.

Much of his tenure has been tumultuous, including a shake-up of newsroom leadership and scrutiny of his ties to a phone-hacking scandal while he worked for News Corp. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Lewis announced a new policy from Bezos ending presidential endorsements by the Post’s editorial board, which blocked a drafted endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.

In a staff meeting in 2024, Lewis warned that the Post was in trouble. “We are losing large amounts of money,” he said. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”

At the end of 2024, Bezos described the struggle in an interview at a conference hosted by The New York Times: “We saved The Washington Post once, and we’re going to save it a second time.”

A spokesperson for Bezos did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The Post is far from alone among publishers in its struggles to achieve profitability. For many outlets, print circulation has continued to nosedive, digital traffic has been hampered by generative AI, and audiences have splintered to various social media platforms. Publishers have had to experiment with different revenue streams, such as events and premium memberships, to offset losses.

“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington and the country as a whole,” said Jeff Stein, the Post’s chief economics correspondent, who was not among those laid off Wednesday.

“I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession,” he said in a statement to the Times. “They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”

Don Graham, whose family owned the Post for more than a half century and oversaw its expansion into a first-rate newspaper that cracked Watergate, said in a post on Facebook that he would “have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s.”

Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, said in a statement that Wednesday “ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

“The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever,” Baron wrote.