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The Washington Post’s White House team directly pleaded with owner Jeff Bezos, the uber-rich Amazon founder, to halt rumored plans of massive layoffs across the newsroom, according to reports.
The scribes emphasized their reliance on colleagues who could be on the chopping block amid unconfirmed rumors WaPo is gearing up to fire around 300 people as the paper grapples with declining readership, after its political coverage was long considered an audience draw.
“Newsroom leaders have conveyed that our team … directly brought in tens of thousands of new subscribers last year,” the reporters wrote Bezos, according to a copy of the missive obtained by Semafor. “But some of our most impactful, most-read articles… have relied on collaboration with all corners of the newsroom.”
White House bureau chief Matt Viser explained the letter to colleagues on an internal Slack channel thus: “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.”
In the letter to Bezos — which began with a chummy “Dear Jeff” — the ink-stained wretches asserted that many of their stories that drew new subscribers relied on teamwork with the international and metro desks, along with sports.
The plea came after WaPo recently told reporters it was scrapping plans to cover the Winter Olympics, sparking speculation the paper could be planning to eliminate its sports desk entirely.
The outlet has since backtracked, announcing plans to send a small team of journos to Italy, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, staffers are reportedly at a breaking point after years of layoffs and a growing distrust of Bezos and publisher Will Lewis after the paper killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and added more conservative voices to its Opinion section — along with making newsroom reorganization moves that came across as half-baked.
“There’s now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post,” a veteran correspondent told CNN.
A WaPo spokesperson told The Post any suggestion that the newsroom is not independent “would be inaccurate and irresponsible.”
Still, staff have been questioning why the paper is yet to publish a story that WaPo reporter Sophia Nguyen was doing about controversial new Amazon Kindle features, including one called “Ask This Book,” the Breaker newsletter recently reported.
“Ask This Book” uses artificial intelligence to let readers “ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers,” according to Amazon – but the Authors Guild has raised concerns about the inability of authors and publishers to opt their books out of the feature.
Nguyen recently went on maternity leave and there are no plans for the paper to assign another reporter to the story, which was described as “critical” of the new feature, according to Breaker.
“Sophia had started some conversations to build toward a possible piece, but it was still in essentially an early reporting phase when she left for her time off. For now, there are no plans,” Books editor John Williams told the newsletter.
Meanwhile, 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.
“Right now there is total fear and paralysis. People feel like Bezos is wandering around Paris with Lauren [Sanchez], and they don’t care about any of us,” a WaPo journalist told Breaker, referring to the owner’s wife.
Former Washington Post Moscow correspondent David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, blamed the newsroom chaos on a political shift.
“Trump came back. Bezos read the tea leaves as so many other billionaires have,” he told Breaker. “And they’ve said, you know what? My main business is not the Washington Post. My main business is Amazon.”
English (US)