Many in the media industry feared layoffs when reports emerged that The Washington Post would restructure its newsroom. After several hundred journalists lost their jobs at the newspaper and entire news desks were shuttered yesterday, the reality was more sweeping than anticipated, drawing widespread scrutiny in what one news outlet called a “murder.” There was additional blowback given the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the world’s wealthiest people.
‘Scaling back’ coverage
The Post has laid off “about 30% of all its employees,” including people “on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom,” said The New York Times. This decision was made because the company had “lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs,” said Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, on a call with newsroom employees.
The historic publication is also restructuring its entire newsroom output. The newspaper is “scaling back foreign coverage and shutting down some sections of the paper,” said CBS News. Most notable was the Post’s sports desk, which will be axed entirely, though it will keep “some sports reporters who will write feature stories,” said NPR. This came as a shock since the Post has long been considered the gold standard for sports reporting, an “apex of the business” that “remained one of the pinnacles of the American sportswriter’s dream until recently,” said sports media outlet Awful Announcing.
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In addition to sports and international coverage cuts, the paper’s “metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the ‘Post Reports’ daily news podcast,” said the Times. Despite this, Murray maintained an optimistic tone. The restructuring will “place The Washington Post on a stronger footing” and position the paper for a “rapidly changing era of new technologies and evolving user habits,” he said in a letter to the newsroom obtained by CBS.
‘Among the darkest days’
Bezos and publisher Will Lewis are “embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special,” said The Atlantic in an article titled “The Murder of The Washington Post.” This is not the first time Bezos and Lewis have made cuts at the paper, and if they “continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.”
Former Post employees also condemned the culling. “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Marty Baron, the Post’s former editor, in a statement. The Post’s “ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
The Post “faces serious business challenges,” said Axios, especially regarding its shrinking subscriber base. The “challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top,” said Baron, and the Post’s readers were “driven away by the hundreds of thousands.”
