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You are here: Home / Economy / Business / WASHINGTON POST DECIMATED BY BEZOS’ DRACONIAN LAYOFFS: IT’S FUTURE MAY BE BLEAK

WASHINGTON POST DECIMATED BY BEZOS’ DRACONIAN LAYOFFS: IT’S FUTURE MAY BE BLEAK

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AI defines “draconian” as “laws, measures, or punishments that are extremely harsh, severe, or cruel. Derived from the7th-century BC Athenian lawmaker Draco—who famously prescribed death for minor offenses—the term is used to describe unreasonably strict rules, such as draconian budget cuts, punishments, or security measures.”

So what word better fits Amazon-Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to lay off one-third of the Washington Post’s staff in an era when billionaire Bezos is spending like often mentioned “drunken sailor.” Bezos has money for super yachts, virtually renting out a city, contribution for the upcoming $400 million White House ballroom, and dishing out $75 million for the new Melania movie plus another $35 in marketing it — thus making it the most expensive documentary in history.

One upon a time, millionaires who owned newspapers kept their eye on the bottom line but considered newspaper ownership as stewardship as well as one more item in their business portfolio. That is now oh, so 20th century.

The New York Times:

The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.

“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”

Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”

“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.

The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.

Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.

Variety’s story included this:

“We have concluded that the company’s structure is too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product,” according to Murray’s memo. “This restructure will help to secure our future in service of our journalistic mission and provide us stability moving forward.” (Read the full memo below.)

National Press Club president Mark Schoeff Jr. said in a statement, “Today’s layoffs at the Washington Post are a devastating setback for the scores of individual journalists affected and for the journalism profession. It is among the most high-profile newsroom dismissals of the year, but similar actions at several other publications are just as painful for the journalists who are now out of work.” He added, “When newsrooms shrink, accountability shrinks with them, and the public is left with fewer facts and fewer answers.”

In a statement, former Post executive editor Martin Baron said, “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.”

The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker in an article titled The Murder of the Washington Post:

We’re witnessing a murder.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. 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. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)

The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.

…Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors. As one longtime Post reporter observed to me, “We’re changing and trimming and cutting our way toward a much more mundane product, and one that doesn’t seem to attract more readers.” To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico. (In another cruel irony, Politico was born out of the Post nearly two decades ago, when two reporters decamped to launch their own fast-paced, scoop-driven, win-the-morning publication.)

Ruth Marcus in a long piece in The New Yorker:

How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

It’s a long article. Read it in its entirety.

From Brian Stelter’s CNN Reliable Sources newsletter:

Case study in ‘near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction’

That’s what former Washington Post editor Marty Baron says this is. Yes, he says, the Post has “acute business problems.” But those challenges “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.”

Loyal subscribers “were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron wrote in a statement this morning, citing the axed endorsement, “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor” with Trump, and other factors.

Baron doesn’t seem to recognize Bezos anymore. When Baron ran the newsroom, he recalled, Bezos “often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”

Jonathan Last in The Bulkwark:

This morning the Washington Post laid off more than 300 people, totaling a third of the organization. The paper has basically shut down its sports, books, and international sections. The metro section is down to roughly a dozen journalists. The Post as it existed last week, has ceased to exist.

What happened?

Most of the obituaries will blame environmental changes of technology and news consumption. These changes are real, but they are not why the Post is now in hospice.

No, this is a story about incompetent leadership that destroyed the paper’s economic viability. It’s a story of self-mutilation.

,,,The short version is that in 2023, Jeff Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher for the Post. As a business decision, the hire made no sense. Lewis was a disgraced Brit with no experience in American media and no track record of success in digital publishing. He was a reliable hack, though: He would do whatever he was told and clearly he had been told to make the paper friendlier to Donald Trump, no matter the cost.

Lewis’s tenure has been an unbroken streak of failure. Every single initiative he has undertaken became a cost-sink: The “third newsroom”; the pivot to Trump; the remaking of the Opinion section; the creation of an aggregator called “Ripple”; and, finally, the restructuring of the paper…

If a newspaper’s publisher makes a bunch of decisions that lose money, and then the owner keeps the publisher while firing the staff who puts out the paper—none of this is really about the money, is it?

Jeff Bezos is worth something like $250 billion. This past weekend he chose to lose about $60 million on a worshipful film about Melania Trump. In 2019 he spent $5 million on a 30-second ad for the Washington Post during the Super Bowl.2 He has spent $40 million building a clock inside a mountain that will supposedly keep time for 10,000 years.3

A man like Jeff Bezos does not do anything because he has to. It has been decades since he was constrained by anything other than his own desires. What happened to the Washington Post over the last three years happened for one reason and one reason only: Because Jeff Bezos wanted it to be so.

Because he gets off on civic vandalism.

PREDICTIONS:
1. The Washington Post will lose even more subscribers.
2. The Philadelphia Inquirer will gave more subscribers, particularly if it can offer more solid national and international news and columns and beef up it local coverage.
3. Online news sources will gain more subscribers.

The Washington Post now seems to almost be in the same category as the “new,” more Trump friendly CBS News.


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Jon Kempner | Dreamstime.com