The Washington Post has cut a third of its staff, citing a “broad strategic reset.” These cuts come after The Post’s billionaire owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ordered job cuts and the scaling back of news coverage for the leading US newspaper.
Affecting journalists and employees across departments, roles in the newsroom’s sports, local and foreign sections have taken the worst hits, with the move coming at the end of 18 tumultuous months of layoffs.
When announcing the sweeping changes, executive editor Matt Murray told employees that the Post was undergoing a “strategic reset” to better position the publication in a “rapidly changing era of new technologies and evolving user habits,” according to several employees who were on the call.
The announcement on Wednesday was met with wide-spread criticism from the paper’s employees and former editors. Marty Baron, the paper’s executive editor until 2021, described it as the “among the darkest days in the history of the world’s greatest news organisations,”
“The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
Angered, many laid off journalists took to social media. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” Foreign correspondent Lizzie Johnson, who is based in Ukraine, said on social media. “I have no words. I’m devastated.”
Sports columnist Barry Svrluga said that the sports department will be closing in its “current form,” citing comments by Murray during the call, and another reporter said most of the metro section, which covers news in the Washington DC area, had also been laid off.
Staff at The Post had been on edge for weeks as rumors of cuts circulated the newsroom. Ahead of the cuts, foreign correspondents, local reporters and the White House team had pleaded with Bezos to preserve their jobs. “Don’t eliminate our jobs,” reporters from the Post’s local desk begged in their memo. “Keep the Washington Post a place that covers Washington.” Bezos, however, remained silent, and did not respond to the series of letters sent by staff.
Washington-Baltimore News Guild (WBNG), the union representing most Post employees, said the cuts made on Wednesday were not “inevitable.” Advising that Bezos may not be a suitable owner for the Post, they commented:
“If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then The Post deserves a steward that will.”
The European and International Federations of Journalists (EFJ & IFJ) have also joined the Guild in condemning the cuts. The union organised a protest of the cuts which was held in front of the Post’s Washington DC building on Thursday.
