Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron said that excruciating cuts unveiled Wednesday represented one of “the darkest days in history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
While Baron expressed personal gratitude for owner Jeff Bezos’ “steadfast support and confidence” during his eight years as executive editor, including when the owner came “under brutal pressure” from Donald Trump, he questioned Bezos’ commitment now. Bezos “often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life,” Baron said. “I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”
Executive editor Matt Murray framed the paper’s downsizing as a “strategic reset” in a morning Zoom call, with several sections either eliminated or gutted. Bezos and embattled CEO Will Lewis did not address staff.
Baron said he believes the paper’s “ambitious 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.”
A Bezos spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Longtime Post columnist Sally Quinn told CNN on Wednesday that she and other staffers were consumed by “grief,” noting the flood of departures that’ve plagued the Post in the last several years.
“It’s just tragic, what’s happening to the Washington Post, and there’s nobody who doesn’t feel that way,” said Quinn, who was married to the Post’s editor during Watergate, Ben Bradlee, until his death in 2014. “It’s not just me, it’s not just the people at the Post, but it’s everybody in journalism. My colleagues at the New York Times are just as upset as anybody because they don’t want to see journalism dying, and they certainly don’t want to see the Washington Post dying.”
Quinn said she was dismayed by Bezos’ actions. “It just seems heartbreaking that he doesn’t feel the paper is important enough to bankroll,” she said.
Baron and Quinn are two of many current and former Post staffers to slam the paper’s sweeping layoffs, which affected a third of the company‘s total headcount. The layoffs will see the paper end its books section and sports “in its current form,” restructure the metro desk and gut its foreign desk. A Post spokesperson said the cuts were “difficult” and said the steps were “designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart.”
Many current and former staffers expressed alarm at the severity of the cuts.
“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington, and the country as a whole,” Jeff Stein, the paper’s chief economics reporter, told TheWrap. “I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession. They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”
A number of journalists affected took to X.
“Well, turns out this was my last story for The Washington Post, 2,011 bylines later,” wrote sports reporter Jesse Dougherty. For nine years, it was a dream in every sense of the word, no matter how many of the company’s leaders tried to make it otherwise. Thanks for being part of the ride.
Cairo bureau chief Claire Parker said it was “hard to understand the logic” of laying off the entire Middle East team.
Many rebukes came from many of the paper’s alums who left the Post in recent years for competitors, with many tearing into Lewis and Murray.
Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker, a former White House reporter for the Post, wrote in the magazine that Wednesday’s layoffs amounted to 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,” she wrote. “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.”
“The incredible incompetence and pusillanimity of William Lewis and Matt Murray is on display for itself at the [Washington Post] this morning,” Atlantic staff writer Sally Jenkins, a former sports reporter for the Post, posted on X. “It’s a self own. This is their last job. Others will work again. They won’t.”
Liz Sly, a former foreign correspondent, took Bezos to task: “What you did today to the Washington Post is a monstrosity. It should be criminalized.”
Baron, while acknowledging the Post’s challenge, said they were “made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity.”
“Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an
especially ugly stain of their own,” he added. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.
Ahead of the layoffs, Atlantic staff writer and former Post reporter Shane Harris wrote on X that “the people responsible for the misery that is about to unfold will probably fail up, which is a damn shame.”
But, he wrote, “today, I’m going to channel my fury into love, for the people in my old newsroom who are about to lose their livelihoods, and the ones who will be expected to pick up the pieces. I’m sending you all every good thought I can muster. Please remember that this is not your fault. You did everything you could, everything that was asked of you and more. I was and remain proud to be your colleague.”
