Washington Post cuts a third of staff, eliminating sports and other sections

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The Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff on Wednesday, eliminating its sports section and cutting several foreign bureaus and its books coverage, the Associated Press reported. Executive editor Matt Murray told staff in a note that the move was painful but necessary as the newspaper sought to weather changes in technology and user habits.

Murray said the outlet could not “be everything to everyone,” and he outlined the changes during a companywide online meeting. After that meeting, staff members began receiving emails with one of two subject lines indicating whether their role was eliminated.

Rumors of layoffs had circulated for weeks, including after word leaked that sports reporters expected to travel to Italy for the Winter Olympics would not go. When official notice arrived, the Associated Press said the scale and scope of cuts affected virtually every department in the newsroom.

Margaret Sullivan, a Columbia University journalism professor and a former media columnist at the Post and The New York Times, said the staff reductions were devastating for people who care about journalism. “The Washington Post has been so important in so many ways, in news coverage, sports and cultural coverage,” Sullivan said, according to the Associated Press report.

Martin Baron, the Post’s first editor under its current owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, condemned the decision and called it “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.” The Associated Press also reported that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized the layoffs as part of a broader pattern in which corporate decisions hollow out newsrooms nationwide.

In remarks to members of the Washington Press Club Foundation, Pelosi said: “A free press cannot fulfill its mission if it is starved of the resources it needs to survive. And when the newsrooms are weakened, our republic is weakened.” The report said journalists also pleaded with Bezos for help as the layoffs approached, but he had no immediate comment when asked.

The Associated Press reported that the Post does not disclose how many subscribers it has and declined to say how many people it employed, preventing estimates of the number of jobs eliminated. The report said the Post also did not outline its finances, and it described the newspaper’s recent troubles as part of a wider challenge for legacy media.

The cuts prompted anger and sadness across the journalism community, the Associated Press said. Ashley Parker, a former Post journalist, wrote in an essay in The Atlantic that the paper had survived for nearly 150 years but warned that if leadership continued on its current path, “it may not survive much longer,” and the report said Parker was among employees who left for other jobs in recent months.

The Associated Press also described how specific layoffs became public during the day. Cairo Bureau Chief Claire Parker announced on X that she had been laid off, along with all of the newspaper’s Middle East correspondents and editors, writing that it was “Hard to understand the logic.” The report said Lizzie Johnson, who wrote last week about covering a war zone in Ukraine without power, heat or running water, also said she was laid off.

Murray said the Post would concentrate on areas that demonstrate “authority, distinctiveness and impact,” including politics, national affairs and security. In his note to staff, Murray described the company’s organizational structure as rooted in an earlier era when the Post was a dominant print product, and he said the outlet had not kept up in areas such as video with consumer habits.

The Associated Press reported that Murray said the Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years,” and he argued that even as the paper produced excellent work, it too often wrote from “one perspective, for one slice of the audience.” Baron, meanwhile, blamed Bezos, describing the moves in terms of endorsement decisions and changes to the editorial page, while saying loyal readers fled and he did not see the same spirit from Bezos that he had felt when Baron was editor.

The Associated Press reported that cuts were also announced on Wednesday at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which moved to an all-digital model at the end of last year. The newspaper said it would cut 50 positions, about 15% of its staff, with half of the eliminated jobs in the newsroom.