The News
The Washington Post is making significant cuts in a bid to usher in the biggest strategic shift since being bought by billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013.
The paper is beginning “a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray said in a call with staff on Wednesday morning.
Today is about “positioning ourselves 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 struggled to do that,” Murray said, according to Post staff who shared Murray’s remarks on the call under the condition of anonymity.
Murray announced a series of major changes to the storied newsroom: It’ll end sports coverage “in its current form,” close its book section, suspend its Post Reports podcast and shrink its international footprint. Murray said the Post will retain several of the sports reporters to join features and cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.”
Notably, the paper also said it would restructure its Metro section, retaining a “more focused team with new beats, and with a particular emphasis on ensuring a healthy presence for local subscribers in the print paper.”
Murray said that politics and government remained the largest desk and would remain central to the paper, alongside national news. It plans to emphasize coverage of so-called futures, or “areas like science, health, medicine, technology, climate and business — advice and health and wellness, investigations and national features, especially with a focus on culture and online and daily life.”
“This is a difficult time, but I know that every one of us believes deeply in this place and the purpose and the opportunity, and we all want to save it. We all want to create a Washington Post that can grow and thrive again,” Murray said.
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Max’s view
Wednesday’s long-awaited cuts mark a sobering low for one of the world’s iconic global newspapers and leave its management grasping to reinvent its strategy and identity.
Just a few years ago, the Washington Post was riding a sugar-high of online traffic, digital subscriptions, and awards tied largely to its scoops, opinion, and hard-hitting coverage of the first Trump administration. Although the New York Times’ business was larger and its editorial scope broader, in the years immediately after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Post, the paper was seen as going “toe-to-toe” with its longtime rival for big stories, the hallmark of a successful newspaper.
But lack of audience interest in President Joe Biden’s administration, coupled with Facebook’s decision to significantly slow the flow of online web traffic to publishers set the paper off on a downward spiral vastly worsened by Bezos’ decision not to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Bezos decided to adjust the publication’s political position – moving its editorial posture from being a strident voice of Washington’s old democratic order to a Trump-curious muted centrism – at precisely the moment when it could have capitalized on an upswing in Washington interest with the return of Trump and his radical overhaul of the federal government. The move – and more, its blunt public announcement – may have pleased Trump world, but turned out to be disastrous for the Post’s business. The non-endorsement infuriated the paper’s left-leaning local and national audience who felt betrayed by a paper that just a few years earlier had rolled out its slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Subscribers jumped ship, as did journalistic and business talent, many of whom left for the Times, independent new media ventures on Substack, and the resurgent Atlantic magazine, which seems to editorially mirror the approach to covering Trump that the Washington Post took during his first term.
Wednesday’s cuts are the culmination of years of difficult industry-wide headwinds, damaging ownership decisions, leadership mismanagement, and turnover that kept the Post from developing and executing goals.
If there is a silver lining, it’s in the opportunity to refocus a leaner newsroom to compete in a fragmented attention landscape dominated by algorithms, and to clarify a brand that has fallen behind competitors like the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Audiences clearly still want news even if they are not necessarily finding or clicking on dry, old school inverted pyramid-style commodity news stories that have already been written by other outlets. A new Post less wedded to that style could help define what the next era of news looks like.
The Post also continues to have an opportunity to win back some of the Washington professional audience that has made Politico and Axios their primary reads, and whose deep pockets and appeal to marketers have financed a generation of news businesses. It’s an opportunity to rethink the form of sports coverage at a time when fans are served clips and opinions instantaneously on social media. It’s a chance to rethink podcasts so the Post isn’t making its version of a show that others have already done, but creating something else entirely.
The View From Post journalists
Publicly and privately, many Post reporters expressed dismay at the layoffs, blasting the paper’s leadership and arguing that Washington would be less informed as a result of the deep cuts.
“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington, and the country as a whole. I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession,” Washington Post chief economics correspondent Jeff Stein told Semafor. “They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”