The Washington Post announced plans on Wednesday to significantly downsize the paper, scaling back international coverage, ending the sports section in its “current form,” restructuring the metro desk and eliminating the books section, according to Post sources.
Executive editor Matt Murray framed the moves to staff in a Wednesday morning meeting as a “strategic reset,” the sources said. Murray did not announce how many jobs will be affected, though a Post spokesperson confirmed that one-third of the company, which includes the newsroom, is impacted.
“These moves are painful,” Murray said. “This is a tough day.”
HR chief Wayne Connell told staff they’ll receive an email saying whether or not they’re roles have been eliminated, and a number of journalists later posted on X that they’d been eliminated, including Cairo bureau chief Claire Parker, sports investigative reporter Will Hobson, race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton, and Amazon reporter Caroline O’Donovan.
Murray took no questions during the short meeting, which rankled staff.
“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.”
Jeff Stein, the paper’s chief economics reporter, called the cuts “a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington, and the country as a whole.”
“I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession,” he told TheWrap. “They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”
“The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company,” a Post spokesperson said. “These steps are 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.”
The Post, which seized the moment during the first Trump administration, battling for scoops with the New York Times, appears to be significantly retrenching in the second term. While Post reporters have continued breaking ground in covering the current Trump administration, on topics ranging from DOGE to Venezeula to White House renovations, the newsroom has been plagued by management misfires, financial losses and staff departures.
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.”
“The Washington Post’s ambitions 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,” he added.
The Post laid off roughly 100 people on its business side in Jan. 2025 before instituting another round of buyouts last summer, which led to the departures of some of the paper’s top journalists and opinion columnists. Several of its top reporters have also left for outlets including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others.
CEO and publisher Will Lewis’ two-year tenure has been marred by controversies and bungled plans, such as his “third newsroom” initiative. And some of management’s decisions have angered subscribers, most notably in killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers reportedly canceled their subscriptions. The paper reportedly lost around $100 million 2024.
Weeks into the second Trump administration, Bezos reoriented the Post’s opinion pages around personal liberties and free markets, prompting an additional 75,000 subscribers to flee.
Bezos has appeared to ingratiate himself with Trump in the second term, sitting alongside other tech titans at the president’s inauguration. Amazon, the company he founded, donated to Trump’s inauguration fund and his White House ballroom project; most recently, the company reportedly paid $75 million to procure and market a documentary on Melania Trump. On Monday, Bezos played host to the Defense Secretary at Blue Origin’s space facilities in Florida.
Meanwhile, Bezos has been notably silent in response to the shocking FBI search of a Post reporter’s home, a move that prompted outrage from journalists and press freedom groups. He also appeared distant in the face of private and public pleas from staff not to make steep cuts.
In recent weeks, journalists appeared to Bezos in hopes of staving off anticipated cuts.
“We are clear-eyed about the financial challenges facing the paper,” the team of White House reporters wrote last week, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TheWrap. “When we accepted our assignments to cover the White House last year, we took the job with a goal to win back former subscribers and draw in new readers. A diversified Washington Post helps us do it.”
The foreign desk issued an appeal to Bezos on Sunday after staffers were told not to travel into high-risk situations, and the metro desk sent a similar message to the owner earlier this week.
“The way forward — toward a greater, more successful and more profitable Washington Post — is not by decimating its local section nor by eliminating the jobs of journalists who live here, raise their families here and understand this region inside and out.”
The paper’s union had also been sharing some of its reporters’ appeals to Bezos on X with the tag “#SaveThePost.” Those, too, went unanswered.
“These layoffs are not inevitable,” the The Washington Post Guild said in a Wednesday statement. “A newsroom cannot be hollow out without consequences for its credibility, its reach and its future.”
The Guild urged Bezos, that if he “is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generation,” then the Post “deserves a steward that will.”
