(Headline USA) The Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff Wednesday, eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage.
The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, called the move painful but necessary to put the outlet on stronger footing and to weather changes in technology and user habits. “We can’t be everything to everyone,” Murray said in a note to staff members.
He outlined the changes in a companywide online meeting, and staff members then began getting emails with one of two subject lines — telling them their role was or was not eliminated.
Rumors of layoffs had circulated for weeks, ever since word leaked that sports reporters who had expected to travel to Italy for the Winter Olympics would not be going. But when official word came down, the size and scale of the cuts were shocking, affecting virtually every department in the newsroom.
“It’s just devastating news for anyone who cares about journalism in America and, in fact, the world,” said Margaret Sullivan, a Columbia University journalism professor and former media columnist at the Post and The New York Times. “The Washington Post has been so important in so many ways, in news coverage, sports and cultural coverage.”
Martin Baron, the Post’s first editor under its current owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, condemned his former boss and called what has happened at the newspaper “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
Bezos, who has been silent in recent weeks amid pleas from Post journalists to step in and prevent the cutbacks, had no immediate comment.
A private company, the Post does not reveal how many subscribers it has, but it is believed to be roughly 2 million. The Post would also not say how many people it has on staff, making it impossible to estimate how many people were laid off Wednesday. The Post also did not outline its finances.
The Post’s troubles stand in contrast to its longtime competitor The New York Times, which has been thriving in recent years, in large part due to investments in ancillary products such as games and its Wirecutter product recommendations. The Times has doubled its staff over the past decade.
Eliminating the sports section puts an end to a department that has hosted many well-known bylines through the years, among them John Feinstein, Michael Wilbon, Shirley Povich, Sally Jenkins and Tony Kornheiser. The Times has also largely ended its sports section, but it has replaced the coverage by buying The Athletic and incorporating its work into the Times website.
The Post’s Book World, a destination for book reviews, literary news and author interviews, has been a dedicated section in its Sunday paper.
Word of specific cuts drifted out during the day, as when Cairo Bureau Chief Claire Parker announced on X that she had been laid off, along with all of the newspaper’s Middle East correspondents and editors. “Hard to understand the logic,” she wrote.
Lizzie Johnson, who wrote last week about covering a war zone in Ukraine without power, heat or running water, said she had been laid off, too.
“The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system,” Ashley Parker, a former Post journalist, wrote in an essay in The Atlantic. But if the paper’s leadership continues its current path, “it may not survive much longer.”
Fearing for the future, Parker was among the staff members who left the newspaper for other jobs in recent months.
Also on Wednesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which stopped print editions and went all-digital at the end of last year, announced that it was cutting 50 positions, or roughly 15% of its staff. Half of the eliminated jobs were in the newsroom.
Murray said the Post would concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness and impact, and resonate with readers, including politics, national affairs and security. Even during its recent troubles, the Post has been notably aggressive in coverage of Trump’s changes to the federal workforce.
The company’s structure is rooted in a different era, when the Post was a dominant print product, Murray said in his note to the staff. In areas such as video, the outlet hasn’t kept up with consumer habits, he said.
“Significantly, our daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years,” he said. “And even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
