Long-rumored cuts hit The Washington Post this morning, seeing the paper axe its sports and books sections and “Post Reports” podcast, drastically shrink both local and international coverage, and lay off what so far is reported to be 30% of its staff. It’s a terrible day for the paper, and for journalism broadly, and absolutely none of it had to happen.
The cuts were announced via a Zoom call this morning, with executive editor Matt Murray instructing staff to stay home rather than come to the office. According to Max Tani, Murray said the cuts were to position the paper “to become more essential to people's lives, and what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that." After the meeting, staff were informed whether they still had jobs via email.
(Aftermath co-founder Nathan Grayson and I were both previously employed at The Washington Post, and our desk, Launcher, was shuttered during layoffs in 2023.)
The Post’s struggles were certainly not caused by the staff of the paper themselves, who consistently put out good, important work in the endlessly trying circumstances of both the world at large and journalism specifically. They were certainly not caused by a lack of money, in the most essential sense; staffers have been appealing for weeks to owner Jeff Bezos, who could fund the paper forever if he felt like it, to stop the cuts.
Having a billionaire owner does not, of course, equate to a healthy business. The Post has been shedding subscribers since the decision to pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, and continued to be in freefall as the outlet’s opinion section was directed to swing right. Half-baked directives like the “third newsroom” came and went, and staff fled the paper in droves as they saw the writing on the wall. Murray and scandal-ridden publisher Will Lewis may have come in with a mandate to turn things around, but if anything have dug the hole deeper. (Axios reports that Lewis wasn’t even on this morning’s call.)
If Murray’s goal is for WaPo to become “more essential” to readers’ lives, less diversified coverage doesn’t seem like the way to do it. NPR writes that “Now the Post appears poised to become primarily a federal paper, seeking to appeal almost exclusively to readers interested in issues about the U.S. government, with an emphasis on national security and American politics.”
This is certainly a top interest of readers of the Post, and a beat it made its name on during Trump’s first term and before. But as many Post staffers pointed out in their calls to Bezos in the weeks leading up to today’s layoffs, no beat exists in a vacuum: Desks shrunk or axed today, like sports and metro, provide essential knowledge and context for government and politics coverage, particularly when your local reporting covers the nation’s political hub of DC. You can’t cut some desks and assume the others will be fine; you can’t assume the paper can just do more with less, the favorite refrain of every media owner.
In a message to staff today, Murray highlighted a declining number of stories as one problem necessitating today’s cuts, writing that the paper’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.” He also wrote that “we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.”
How the solution to these problems is less coverage, more narrowly focused, isn’t clear, but it’s hard to take any of today’s cuts and their half-assed justifications with any kind of good faith. It’s hard not to see this as Bezos, bored or maybe even actively hostile to the paper he once supported, either intentionally trying to destroy it, or attempting to defang it to curry favor with Trump.
All of this is personal for me, as it is for others who’ve written about today’s bloodbath. I spent a day shy of a year at the Post, coming in to run a desk that was closed three months after my hire, and two months after I moved to DC for the job after over 20 years in New York. In a show of something like decency, which I did appreciate even if I wasn’t very good at expressing it, I was moved to another department rather than getting laid off with my team, and I spent a miserable season struggling to climb the stairs to where the bulk of the journalists sat without having to cry in the bathroom afterward because I wanted so badly to be sitting up there with them. But even at my own personal worst, I was awestruck by the people around me and the efforts they made so naturally to give me chances to shine: Slack messages from other desks asking for expertise on games or trans issues, meetings with teams eager to collaborate with my new team, opportunities to help lead an employee resource group or attend staff-led skill shares or just go on a lunchtime bike ride to visit the cherry blossoms at Hains Point.
I found the Post to be an astonishingly collaborative newsroom, where my colleagues seemed to want me there even if executives didn’t, where bosses and peers made far more effort than I deserved to meet me where I was. People shared stories of their own career setbacks and told me the Post was a place where I could bounce back, where opportunities could be open to me if I stuck it out. Even though I eventually decided to leave to start Aftermath, I still feel an admiration for and allegiance to the Post that sometimes feels unearned for the amount of time I actually spent there.
So it’s hard for me to see the big picture of today’s layoffs when they have so many specific names and faces attached, when I know first-hand how much better the people affected today deserve. That Lewis and Murray and Bezos–if Bezos is even paying attention–could look at all these people and their work and their kindness and their dedication and decide the paper would be better off without them is unthinkable to me, but I’ve long given up on trying to understand how media executives think.
An outlet with the talent the Post has on hand, with the resources Bezos is able to pour into it, should not be doing layoffs of this scope and scale. Not just because, essentially, it doesn’t need to, but because any decision-maker who’s risen to the position of calling these shots should be smart enough to look at the paper and recognize that the value of the thing they have comes from its abundance: the various desks and experts and coverage areas that all work together to make the paper what it is. A lesser paper is not going to win more subscribers or bring the company more money. A narrow focus on a particular conception of politics, at a time when Trump and his ilk are using every avenue possible–the arts, the environment, healthcare, sports, and more–to foster their agenda will not serve readers or stand up to power. It’s just going to make the Post’s coverage worse, and its staff more overworked and unhappy, and the paper less relevant to readers who need a robust free press.
Maybe this is what Bezos wants. It’s certainly what Trump and his administration want. Not just a worse paper, but a worse environment for journalism as a whole, with fewer jobs, less coverage to draw from, a shorter horizon to picture as young journalists imagine what their careers could be.
Immiseration is one of the ruling class’ most powerful tools these days, and that feels like the only logic today’s layoffs have. They make the public less informed, and silence current and would-be journalists without the need for lawsuits and insults. Today’s cuts feel like a PR move as much as a corporate one, a reminder of the power of the rich, who can make worse so many lives without having to do anything, without even having to acknowledge it.
It’s hard not to talk about the Post like it’s dead, though of course it’s not. I have every confidence the people remaining will do the best work possible with what they have in front of them, because they believe their audience deserves it, even if their executives and owner don’t. But it simply doesn’t have to be like this, not for a paper owned by one of the world’s richest men, and not for a journalism industry that’s more essential than ever.
