On the morning of Feb. 4, Executive Editor Matt Murray of The Washington Post announced that employees should stay home from the office and log in for a full-staff meeting on Zoom. There, he would announce The Washington Post’s decision to lay off over a third of their journalists, leaving over 350 writers without work.
The Metro desk, which covers local news in Washington D.C., shrunk from 40 to 12 staffers, the foreign desks were cut from 20 to 12 locations, and both the sports and books sections would be axed entirely.
Amazon founder and owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, has yet to issue an official statement regarding the layoff. Bezos purchased The Post in 2013 for $250 million after former publisher Donald Graham deliberately sought him out, hoping Bezos’s understanding of technology would transition the paper into the digital age. At the time of purchase, The Post was experiencing large financial difficulties, losing over $50 million annually.
Following the purchase, Bezos claimed to be optimistic about the paper’s success, hoping to assist its bleeding state by implementing certain business strategies that worked with Amazon “What has worked at Amazon is focusing on the customer,” said Bezos. “Putting the customer first.”
Beginning in 2016, when President Donald Trump took office for his first term, The Post saw a surge in news coverage regarding the election, with the number of published articles about the candidates reaching 1200 per day. Reader traffic numbers rose by millions, and Bezos introduced new content-distribution strategies, like offering subscription discounts to Amazon Prime members. The staff hailed him for what felt like a rescue from the paper’s financial troubles, until the financial troubles returned.
Profits dwindled significantly by 2025—with The Post losing over 100 million dollars a year—in contrast to the New York Times, which has maintained a yearly net profit of $200 million. In an official statement by the paper, The Post explained the layoffs to be “difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to significant restructuring across the company.”
Former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron explains that The Post had an initiative when Bezos first took over. “He had set out a clear strategy for the post,” said Baron. “We needed to be international. We lived in a digital era, and this gave us the opportunity to distribute everywhere.”
Although Baron publicly supported Bezos’s original plan for the publication, he has also expressed fears that the paper has lost sight of its original mission and is unsure what to do next in the midst of this larger financial crisis. “I think this represents a sad, disparate moment for the Post,” said Baron. “And I worry that neither the owner nor the current CEO has established a sort of mission for the organization or a clear strategy for recovering from this.”
Capra McCormick
English major and an English major who usually reads in her free time and busy time.
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