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The Washington Post said Wednesday it will eliminate a substantial number of jobs, significantly scaling back reporting on sports and overseas affairs. Employees across multiple departments will be affected, but the newsroom’s sports, local and foreign sections are absorbing the biggest losses—raising questions about how the paper will continue covering national and global stories. The paper is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Executive editor Matt Murray said the cuts would bring "stability". But the announcement was met with condemnation from the paper's employees and some former leaders, one of whom described it as among the "darkest days in the history of" the storied newspaper.
"Today's news is painful. These are difficult actions," Murray wrote in a note to staff on Wednesday.
"If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition."
In his explanation of the cuts, Murray said that the paper's online traffic had plummeted in the last three years amid the artificial intelligence boom, and that it was "too rooted in a different era".
"Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience," he said.
Ahead of the announcement, foreign correspondents and local reporters had pleaded with Bezos to preserve their jobs.
"Continuing to eliminate workers only stands to weaken the newspaper, drive away readers and undercut The Post's mission," the Washington Post Guild said in a statement on Wednesday.
Laid off journalists took to social media, with many voicing anger about the decision to scale back coverage of foreign news. The paper's former Cairo bureau chief said she was laid off alongside the "entire roster" of Middle East correspondents and editors. A correspondent based in Ukraine lamented losing her job "in the middle of a warzone".
Another reporter said most of the paper's metro section, which is focused on news in the Washington DC region, had also been laid off.
The layoffs mark the latest in a series of staff cuts and buyouts across The Post's departments in recent years, amid backlash to some of the paper's editorial decisions.
