Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post conducts widespread layoffs, gutting a third of its staff

(CNN) — The Washington Post laid off about one in three employees across the company Wednesday morning, dealing another big blow to a newsroom that has reached a breaking point.

Post owner Jeff Bezos had no immediate comment about the cutbacks.

Bezos has been pushing the Post’s management team to return the publication to profitability, but many journalists at the paper have criticized his approach and questioned his motives.

“Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump,” former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler said in a column earlier this week.

Bezos and the company he founded, Amazon, have complex relationships with the Trump administration. Earlier this week Bezos hosted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Bezos-owned Blue Origin rocket company.

Post employees had been bracing for widespread layoffs for several weeks. On Wednesday morning, staffers were told to “stay home today” while notices were sent about who had been laid off.

“These moves include substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments,” executive editor Matt Murray said in an internal memo.

The impacts include dramatically shrinking the Metro desk, shutting down almost the entire Sports section, closing the Books section, and cancelling the daily “Post Reports” podcast, sources at the newspaper said.

The Post’s international coverage is also being markedly reduced, though some bureaus outside the US will maintain a “strategic overseas presence,” Murray said.

Major cuts are also being made on the business side of the Post’s beleaguered operations.

Murray said “this restructure will help to secure our future in service of our journalistic mission and provide us stability moving forward,” though many staffers heaped skepticism on his claim.

At the Post lately, “it’s just been one funeral after the other,” contributor Sally Quinn, wife of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, told CNN’s Pamela Brown Wednesday morning.

Quinn said of Bezos, “It just seems heartbreaking that he doesn’t feel the paper is important enough to bankroll.”

“They say” the cuts are for the good of the paper long-term, she added, but “if you don’t have the great reporters, you don’t have any good content, who’s going to want to buy it?”

‘I’m out…’

Employees described the severe cuts in social media posts Wednesday morning. “I’m out, along with just a ton of the best in the biz. Horrible,” the Post’s Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan wrote on X.

“I’m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post,” race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton wrote. “This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.”

The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, has spoken privately about finding a path to profitability for the Post by focusing the paper’s investment on politics and a few other key areas, while cutting back in areas like sports and foreign affairs.

That talk prompted teams of reporters to send Bezos impassioned letters that urged him not to shrink the newsroom.

In one letter obtained by CNN, signed by bureau chief Matt Viser and seven other White House reporters, the staff said it will be unable to maintain its history of excellence in reporting if the Post lays off significant numbers from other news units.

“If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are,” Viser and the other signees said.

Lewis went ahead with the plan.

On Wednesday morning, Murray wrote in a staff-wide memo that “for the immediate future, we will concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact and that resonate with readers: politics, national affairs, people, power and trends; national security in DC and abroad; forces shaping the future including science, health, medicine, technology, climate, and business; journalism that empowers people to take action, from advice to wellness; revelatory investigations; and what’s capturing attention in culture, online, and in daily life.”

‘Among the darkest days’

The legendary former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who retired from the paper in 2021, said in a statement that “this ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

“Of course, there were acute business problems that had to be addressed,” Baron wrote. “No one can deny that.”

The Post, like many other American newspapers, has undergone many rounds of cost-cutting over the years.

But those challenges “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top,” Baron wrote.

Loyal subscribers “were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron wrote, citing among other factors the late 2024 decision by Bezos to spike a planned editorial page endorsement of Kamala Harris.

That decision, though separate from the newsroom’s operations, led to mass cancellations from subscribers, hurting the Post’s bottom line.

Baron also cited what he called “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor” with Trump.

A year ago, Bezos outlined a new vision for the Post’s once-esteemed opinion section, promoting libertarian ideals, including free markets and personal liberties. That decision led opinion editor David Shipley to exit the company.

When Baron ran the newsroom, he recalled, Bezos “often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”

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Andrew Kirell contributed reporting.