The Washington Post is bracing for sweeping layoffs, delivering another gut punch to a once-dominant newsroom that staffers say has reached a breaking point.
Executive Editor Matt Murray and human resources chief Wayne Connell emailed employees early Wednesday, telling them to “stay home today” but log on for an 8:30 a.m. ET Zoom meeting where leadership will announce “significant actions across the company.”
Those actions include shutting down nearly the entire Sports section, closing the Books section and canceling the daily Post Reports podcast, according to sources inside the paper.
Among the deepest cuts is a “restructuring” of the Metro desk, which covers Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The Post’s international footprint is also expected to shrink sharply, though some overseas bureaus will remain open.
The layoffs have been anticipated for weeks, particularly after managers told staff the paper would not send reporters to the Winter Olympics this month, a decision later reversed. Publisher Will Lewis has privately pushed a strategy aimed at profitability by concentrating resources on politics and a handful of core areas, while scaling back coverage such as sports and foreign affairs.
That plan triggered pushback from within the newsroom. Teams of reporters sent letters to owner Jeff Bezos urging him not to hollow out the paper.
In one letter obtained by CNN, signed by bureau chief Matt Viser and seven other White House reporters, staff warned the Post could not maintain its standards if other desks were gutted.
“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,” the letter said.
A year ago, Bezos rolled out a new vision for the opinion section, emphasizing libertarian ideas such as free markets and personal liberty. That shift led opinion editor David Shipley to leave. Months earlier, Bezos scrapped a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, a move that sparked subscriber cancellations and hit revenue.
Some current and former Post journalists blame the turmoil on Bezos’ alleged effort to placate President Donald Trump, given Amazon’s and Bezos’ broader business interests.
“Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump,” former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote this week.
Former executive editor Marty Baron, who retired in 2021, called the moment grim.
“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” Baron said. “Of course, there were acute business problems that had to be addressed. No one can deny that.”
But he added, “The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.”
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