The Washington Post on Wednesday carried out a sweeping round of layoffs of 30 percent workforce, cutting accross sports, local news and international coverage department of the organization.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
The company laid off workers on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, Daily Intel Newspaper have learned.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos, an American entrepreneur, purchased the paper for $250 million from the Graham family, but the cuts are a sign that the founder of Amazon.com has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet.
The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
