The Washington Post lays off about 30% of staff and scales back key areas
Kyiv • UNN
The Washington Post announced the layoff of about 30% of its employees, including hundreds of journalists, due to significant losses. The publication will focus on national news, politics, business, and healthcare, closing its sports, books, and local sections.
The Washington Post announced massive layoffs affecting about 30% of its employees, including hundreds of journalists. This applies to both business-side employees and over 300 of the approximately 800 journalists in the newsroom. This was reported by The New York Times, writes UNN.
Details
As the publication notes, these cuts indicate that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the richest people in the world by selling goods online, has still not found a way to build and maintain a profitable media outlet in the digital age. In the early years of his ownership, the newspaper expanded, but recently the company has been struggling.
The Post's editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, stated during a call with newsroom staff on Wednesday morning that the company had been incurring significant losses for too long and was not meeting readers' needs. According to him, all sections will be affected to some extent, and ultimately the publication will focus even more on national news and politics, as well as business and healthcare, significantly reducing other areas.
If anything, today is about positioning ourselves as an even more essential publication in people's lives in an increasingly saturated, competitive, and complex media landscape. And after several years when, frankly, The Post had serious problems
Murray announced that the sports section would be closed, although some journalists would remain and move to the features department to cover sports culture. The local news (metro) section will be reduced, the book section will be closed, as will the daily news podcast "Post Reports."
He added that international coverage would also be reduced, but correspondents would remain in nearly a dozen locations.
"I know that each of us deeply believes in this place," he said, "and we all want to save it." According to him, The Post must "become more agile and find new ways of working and innovating to understand what our readers want more of and what they want less of."
Addition
Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which was suffering from declining audience and shrinking subscriptions. Lewis experimented with a number of changes, including the active use of artificial intelligence for commentary, podcasts, and news aggregation.
In late 2024, Bezos described the situation in an interview at a conference organized by The New York Times: "We saved The Washington Post once, and we will save it a second time."
During a staff meeting in 2024, Lewis warned that The Post was in a difficult position. "We are losing large sums of money," he said. "Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your material."
The Post is far from the only publisher facing profitability issues. For many media outlets, print circulation continues to fall sharply, digital traffic is suffering due to generative AI, and audiences are fragmented across various social media platforms. Publishers are forced to experiment with new revenue streams — such as events and premium memberships — to offset losses.