The Washington Post has announced it is laying off one-third of its work force as it scales back the paper’s sports and foreign news coverage.
The cuts will affect employees across departments with roles in the newsroom’s sports, local and foreign sections hit particularly hard.
The Post is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, with the news coming in the same week that the Melania documentary – which Amazon spent an estimated $75m on – flopped at the box office.
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Whilst Bezos has stayed silent on the sweeping staff cuts, executive editor Matt Murray said in a note to staff that they would bring “stability.”
“Today’s news is painful. These are difficult actions,” he wrote.
“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition.”
Murray attempted to justify the cuts by pointing to declining online traffic for the publication, claiming it was “too rooted in a different era.”
But the cuts have been condemned across the industry, with former editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron, saying it was one of the “darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organisations”..
Many laid off staff have vented their anger on social media. The paper’s former Cairo bureau chief said she had been laid off alongside the “entire roster” of Middle East correspondents and editors, the BBC reports.
A Ukraine-based correspondent voiced her devastation at losing her job “in the middle of a warzone.”
Following the news of the cuts, many pointed out that Bezos’s company, Amazon, had this year forked out an estimated $75 million for the documentary about Melania Trump, which has been a critical and box office flop.
Summing everything up pretty perfectly was US senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote on X: “If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
“Democracy dies in oligarchy.”
Bezos, the fourth richest person in the world, bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250m (£163m). Since the purchase, the paper has seen a series of staff cuts and buyouts, and it sparked controversy in 2024 by taking the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in that year’s election.
The paper lost tens of thousands of subscribers as a result.