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The Washington Post announced mass layoffs across the newsroom Wednesday – ignoring impassioned pleas from reporters to billionaire owner Jeff Bezos over the past few weeks, according to a report.
Hundreds of journalists across the newsroom could be impacted, especially the paper’s local, international and sports desks, according to the New York Times.
Status newsletter earlier reported as many as 300 employees company-wide could be laid off.
Newsroom staffers were told to “stay home today” and attend a Zoom call at 8:30 a.m. ET about “significant actions across the company,” according to a Wednesday email from Executive Editor Matt Murray and Chief Human Resources Office Wayne Connell obtained by CNN.
“The actions we are taking include a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” Murray said on the call, according to the New York Times.
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Mass layoffs have been expected for weeks after the broadsheet sent out a shocking internal memo announcing it was scrapping its Winter Olympics coverage, sparking fears it could eliminate its sports desk entirely.
It ultimately reversed this decision and announced plans to send a small team of reporters to Italy – but staffers continued to panic over reports the paper’s publisher, Will Lewis, has spoken privately about investing in politics and cutting back on sports and foreign affairs.
“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, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are,” White House bureau chief Matt Viser and seven other White House reporters wrote in a letter to Bezos obtained by CNN.
In the letter to Bezos — which began with a chummy “Dear Jeff” — the journos attempted to appeal to the billionaire Amazon founder with numbers, claiming that many of their stories that drew new subscribers required collaboration with the international and metro desks.
International correspondents and more than two dozen Washington, DC-area beat reporters have also sent letters to Bezos urging him to hold off on firing staff, according to CNN.
There is already a growing concern across the newsroom that the cuts could be “worse than the dire scenarios already imagined,” one staffer told Status newsletter.
Many journos at the paper are already applying for opportunities elsewhere as they look to jump ship, according to the newsletter.
Meanwhile, staffers are reportedly at a breaking point after years of layoffs and a growing distrust of Bezos and Lewis after the paper killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and added more conservative voices to its Opinion section.
Bezos’ new vision for the WaPo’s opinion section emphasized free markets and personal liberties – ultimately leading opinion editor David Shipley and several columnists to exit the company.
His canceled endorsement of Harris fueled outrage among loyal readers, who canceled their subscriptions en masse and hurt the paper’s bottom line.
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