Veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward said he was “crushed” that hundreds of Post reporters were laid off this week, noting that Washington, D.C., readers would be underserved by the paper’s downsizing.
“I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” he said in his first statement on the cuts, which was posted on X. “They deserve more.”
Woodward, who rose to fame after he broke the Watergate scandal with his colleague Carl Bernstein, said the paper has produced “many superb and excellent ground-breaking stories” under executive editor Matt Murray. “There will be more,” he said.
“I will do everything in my power to help make sure The Washington Post thrives and survives,” he added.
The statement comes after the paper laid off a third of the company on Wednesday, including more than 300 journalists. The Post has characterized the moves as part of a “strategic reset.” The layoffs shuttered the books desk and the sports desk in its current form, gutted the foreign and metro sections and hit nearly every other section.
Woodward, who serves as an associate editor at the paper, declined to elaborate on the statement in a brief phone call with TheWrap and said he was in the middle of a deadline on a book he was finishing.
“I’m just gonna let that stand,” he said.
Bernstein did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Woodward joins a chorus of Post staffers and alums who’ve spoken out about the layoffs, with many of them taking aim at owner Jeff Bezos and CEO Will Lewis for mismanaging the paper’s business operations. Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of the Post, told TheWrap that “this ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Woodward’s statement did not mention either man by name.
Such staffers’ frustrations grew more vocal on Thursday after Lewis — who did not participate in the Zoom call on Wednesday, where Murray announced the layoffs — was spotted on the red carpet at the NFL Honors in San Francisco ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Woodward has spoken out infrequently since Bezos acquired the paper, though he and Bernstein decried Bezos’ decision to spike a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris days before the election and end the paper’s history of endorsing presidential candidates as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
The decision, they said in a joint statement at the time, “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
Woodward was one of the first staffers to speak with Bezos upon the billionaire’s 2013 acquisition of the newspaper. During a staff meeting, he asked Bezos why he purchased the paper.
“I finally concluded that I could provide runway — financial runway — because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” Bezos responded, according to New Yorker staff writer and Post alum Ruth Marcus. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
