As the Washington Post newsroom braces for layoffs, journalists took their case public on Monday, turning to social media to urge mega-billionaire owner Jeff Bezos to support the paper’s robust and storied foreign coverage.
“Hi @JeffBezos,” Ukraine bureau chief Siobhán O’Grady wrote on X. “We will never forget your support for our essential work documenting the war in Ukraine, which still rages. Your wife has called our team ‘badass beacons of hope.’ We risk our lives for the stories our readers demand. Please believe in us and #SaveThePost.”
Correspondent Yeganeh Torbati, who covers Iran for the paper, also tweeted directly to Bezos, saying she wants “nothing more than to keep doing this important work,” while White House bureau chief Matt Viser wrote that “it’s impossible to overstate how much we rely upon” the international desk and “how diminished we’d be without them.”
The public appeals on Monday speak to fears inside the paper that significant cuts are on the horizon — particularly in international coverage — and reflect growing doubts about whether Bezos, the Amazon founder reportedly worth around $250 billion, remains fully invested in supporting the paper. The Post, which reportedly lost around $100 million in 2024, went through a painful round of buyouts last year, and staffers worry that further cuts at the start of 2026 could deepen the turmoil at a time when rigorous coverage of global conflict and crisis feels more essential than ever.
[Layoffs will] reaffirm a widely held belief on staff that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis are not serious caretakers of The Washington Post.”
In conversations with TheWrap, staffers expressed frustration with Bezos’ seeming distance from the paper, as well as with CEO and publisher Will Lewis, whose widely touted “third newsroom” initiative never gained traction amid broader upheaval during his two-year tenure. They also fault management for the loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers after the paper spiked a 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris. “If their answer to those losses is to take it out on staff now, what are we doing?” asked a staffer.
“The lack of communication has left folks twisting in the wind,” another staffer told TheWrap, adding that “many people aren’t sure if they’ll have jobs next week.”
The Post’s precarious state contrasts sharply from a decade ago, when it was among the standout publications during Donald Trump’s first term, with the paper, under then-executive editor Marty Baron, landing major scoops and adopting the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Even as the Post continues to deliver dogged coverage of Trump’s second administration, Bezos’ cozier relationship with the president and his remaking of the opinion section around “personal liberties and free markets” have raised concerns about whether he remains as committed to holding the administration accountable.
It wasn’t lost on staffers that Bezos didn’t publicly comment on the FBI’s search of a Post reporter’s home earlier this month, even as he found time to tweet about Polymarket. At the same time, Amazon MGM Studios reportedly paid $40 million for the licensing rights to a new Melania Trump documentary — which was screened Saturday night at the White House — while Amazon is among the corporate donors to Trump’s ballroom project.
Foreign correspondents pleaded with Bezos over the weekend, urging him in a letter to “preserve our newspaper’s global coverage.” They reminded Bezos how he told staff, upon buying the paper in 2013, that being “profitable and shrinking” is “a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And at worst, it leads to extinction.”
A third staffer told TheWrap, “If Bezos cares a little bit about this newspaper, and wants this paper to get back to the golden days under the leadership of Marty Baron, then he needs to make changes at the top.”
Foreign reporting has long been one of the Post’s hallmarks, stretching back to Pulitzer Prize-winning work by the likes of David Remnick and the late Anthony Shadid, and extending to more recent coverage of ISIS, the Israel-Hamas war, Ukraine, Iran and Venezuela. That legacy is now colliding with deep uncertainty inside the newsroom, where rumors swirl that not only foreign coverage, but sports and metro desk teams are on the chopping block.
Potential layoffs on the international desk are particularly unnerving, not only because of the Post’s legacy, but because some foreign journalists rely on the paper for U.S. visas — or to continue reporting from the countries they cover.
Foreign correspondents have been told not to travel to crisis zones after Feb. 1, which fueled speculation that management wants U.S.-based staff at home ahead of potential layoffs next month.
On Friday, the Post also abruptly canceled plans to send a contingent to cover the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games, which kick off on Feb. 6. Though the specter of layoffs has loomed for some time, “cutting Olympics coverage at the last minute did shock a lot of staff,” the second staffer told TheWrap. “It all feels more serious and urgent now.”
TheWrap learned Monday that the Post now plans to send four journalists to the games, as opposed to the more than a dozen originally expected. A Post spokesperson confirmed the Olympics plan.
“Perhaps the cuts aren’t as bad as rumored,” added the second staffer. “But if they are, it’ll reaffirm a widely held belief on staff that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis are not serious caretakers of The Washington Post.”
Turning out the lights on ambitious, hard-hitting international coverage would give a stark new meaning to the Post’s long-standing warning that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Corbin Bolies contributed reporting for this story.
