The Washington Post’s team of White House reporters sent a letter to Jeff Bezos on Tuesday pleading with the paper’s billionaire owner to stave off steep layoffs expected to hit a number of the paper’s reporting desks, including sports, metro and arts.
“We are clear-eyed about the financial challenges facing the paper,” the team of reporters wrote, 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 letter was shared in the Post’s union Slack by White House bureau chief Matt Viser, who told his colleagues the team sent the letter to Bezos on Tuesday.
“If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper,” Viser told his colleagues in a Slack message. “And if other sections are diminished, we all are.”
The contents of the letter were first reported by Semafor. The Post did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A spokesperson for Bezos did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The eight reporters on the team — Viser, Cat Zakrzewski, Cleve Wootson Jr., Dan Diamond, Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Michael Birnbaum and Natalie Allison — told Bezos in the letter that various desks have contributed to their work in covering the second Trump administration, noting that “some of our most impactful, most-read articles … have relied on collaboration with all corners of the newsroom.”
“Given the uncertainty facing The Post, we wanted to tell you directly how the White House team relies on other desks and explain how our colleagues’ work helps lift up our own,” they wrote. “We’re all available to discuss this by phone or in person, too.”
They spotlighted collaborations with the foreign desk to report on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda; stories with the metro desk to cover the deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C.; coverage of the upcoming World Cup with the sports desk; and their work with the arts desk to cover how Trump has taken over cultural institutions.
On X, Post journalists have similar pointed out the collaboration across desks at the paper.
The letter is one of several recent appeals to Bezos in response to expected cuts at the paper, which could number up to 300 across the company and are expected to severely impact the newsroom’s sports, metro and foreign desks, among others.
Staffers fear the cuts could come within the next week, and the rumblings come after the paper initially decided not to send any reporters to cover the Winter Olympics next month after paying to do so. (The paper eventually reversed course again and agreed to send four reporters.)
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 wrote 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 has also been sharing some of its reporters’ appeals to Bezos on X with the tag “#SaveThePost.” Bezos has not publicly addressed the reports of layoffs.
Michael Calderone contributed to this report.
