When Washington Post foreign correspondents pleaded with owner Jeff Bezos last month to preserve global coverage, they reminded him of the commitment he made upon buying the paper back in 2013.
“You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best,” Bezos said at his first staff town hall. “And at worst, it leads to extinction.”
Now Post journalists are living out that grim reality while Bezos is missing in action.
The Amazon founder didn’t speak up last month when the FBI searched a Post reporter’s home, or respond to staff letters and pleas on X. He wasn’t on Wednesday’s Zoom call to discuss the Post’s “strategic reset” at the paper, which is expected to impact a third of staff, resulting in more than 300 journalist layoffs. However, Bezos was observed greeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin’s Florida facilities on Monday, signaling that rockets, rather than reporters, were top of mind this week.
The Washington Post, like other legacy newspapers, had already endured painful rounds of cuts and buyouts when Bezos bought it from the Graham family, the much-admired stewards of paper. Many staffers were hopeful at the time to land an owner who is also one of the richest individuals on the planet, one even telling me, “It doesn’t seem like a terrible thing to have the security of a billionaire.”
Despite making significant investments early on, and enduring Donald Trump’s first-term wrath, Bezos has appeared more determined to curry favor with the administration in the second term than bolster the Post. He clearly still has the money, with his net worth ballooning since 2013 from $25 billion to around $250 billion.
He just doesn’t seem to have the appetite. And with Wednesday’s deep cuts, Bezos went from once being lionized as the paper’s savior to vilified as its executioner.
“We’re witnessing a murder,” Ashley Parker, one of the Post’s star White House reporters during Donald Trump’s first term, wrote as the paper’s management unveiled plans to gut the foreign, sports and metro desks, while eliminating the books section and “Post Reports” podcast. Parker is one of the marquee reporters who fled the Post to The Atlantic. Another former Post reporter, Liz Sly, wrote on X that what Bezos did “is a monstrosity” and “should be criminalized.”
Sally Quinn, a legendary Post writer and wife of late editor Ben Bradlee, said on CNN that “everybody is in a state of grief.”
It’s been heartbreaking to watch one Post journalist after another reveal on X that they, too, have been laid off. I have reported on previous cuts at the Post, along with legacy newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. But the magnitude of experience and talent shed from the Post’s newsroom at one time is on another, staggering scale. It’s also horrifying to see hundreds of journalist let go as the press comes under increasing threat in Trump’s second term.
Bezos did not respond to a request for comment through a representative. The Post said in a statement that the restructuring is “designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets the Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”
Among the areas of “distinctiveness” the Post plans to lean into is “national security in DC and abroad,” according to a memo from executive editor Matt Murray. But it’s hard to see how national security coverage isn’t severely weakened by laying off the Ukraine bureau chief and Middle East staff, along with correspondents and editors at other foreign outposts.
Murray also acknowledged that the Post has “grappled with financial challenges for some time.”
While Post staff surely recognize the paper’s struggles, including reportedly losing $100 million 2024, they also fault management for a series of blunders, including paper’s hamfisted spiking of its Kamala Harris endorsement, resulting in hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions.
Marty Baron, the paper’s acclaimed editor during the first Trump term, said Wednesday that Bezos’s “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” providing “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
Many Post staffers and alums also blame CEO and publisher Will Lewis for the paper’s financial state, noting missteps such as his “third newsroom” initiative. “Everyone in journalism has had to face the same challenges,” said former reporter Shane Harris. “The Post is losing money because the people who run the Post don’t know what they’re doing.”
Lewis, who was in Davos last month, was also noticeably absent from Wednesday’s Zoom call to break the news to staff. That job was left to Murray and the paper’s HR chief. “This was handled with cowardice,” one longtime staffer told TheWrap. “Washington Post executives took no ownership this morning for the questionable strategic and business decisions they have made that put the Post behind.”
Another Post staffer told The Wrap that Bezos, Lewis and Murray “just spit on the grave of Katherine Graham and the legacy of the Washington Post,” a reference to the courageous late publisher who stood behind the newsroom in the face of government pressure during Watergate and the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Post, this second staffer added, is “finished.”
The Post’s ambition to be a top global new organization does appear over, along with its ambition to deeply cover local news and Washington sports — coverage areas prized by many of its readers in the DC metro region. “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s,” former publisher Don Graham wrote on Facebook, along with offering to help laid off journalists.
The Post still has the capacity to do standout journalism. Its reporters broke ground this past year in covering the Trump administration’s remaking of the federal workforce, his demolition of the East Wing, and Hegseth’s role in military strikes against alleged drug traffickers near Venezuela — the latter of which earned a rebuke from the Pentagon as it kicked off its first news conference for a more Trump-friendly press corp. The AP cheerily noted last April how, “after a year of turmoil, The Washington Post is taking note of its journalism again.”
The turmoil now under way didn’t have to happen.
Bezos, who owns a $500 million superyacht, and last year spent tens of millions on a lavish Venice wedding, could continue bankrolling the paper at its most recent headcount. His ex-wife, Mackenzie Bezos, has demonstrated the power of philanthropy, giving away $19 billion and counting. It also hasn’t been lost among staff in recent weeks, amid wide-scale panic over impending cuts, that Amazon MGM Studios was reportedly spending $35 million to market the “Melania” documentary, which it had paid $40 million to secure — itself a record amount.
“Here we have one of the wealthiest people in the history of the universe, who could easily manage both his business and keep the Washington Post healthy. I just don’t know why he would fail to do that,” New Yorker editor David Remnick told TheWrap.
Remnick began his reporting career at the Post in 1982, working across the metro, sports and style sections. He later became the paper’s Moscow correspondent, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Lenin’s Tomb.”
“These big democratic institutions, these which we now call legacy media institutions, have all kinds of flaws. Nobody denies that,” Remnick said. “But they’re also precious and rare and if we’ve learned anything historically — and not just during the Trump administration, but historically — to undermine them and to erode them and to finally destroy them causes far greater destruction than we realize in the moment.”
“We tend to fall into this habit, and particularly in the past year, with so many things happening in a given day and any given week, of not taking full account of their importance, that they become a one day news story at best,” he added. “I fear that’s what might happen here.”
— Corbin Bolies contributed reporting
