Washington Post Announces A Series Of Layoffs

The Washington Post is bracing for a sweeping collapse inside its newsroom as leadership prepares to announce mass layoffs Wednesday morning, a move that sources say will eliminate roughly one-third of the company’s workforce and fundamentally reshape one of America’s most storied newspapers.

In an early-morning email, Executive Editor Matt Murray and human resources chief Wayne Connell told employees to stay home and log on for an 8:30 a.m. ET Zoom meeting, where “significant actions across the company” will be unveiled. Behind the vague language, the reality is far more severe.

According to sources inside the paper, the Post is effectively shutting down its Sports section, closing the Books section entirely, and canceling its daily Post Reports podcast. The Metro desk — long responsible for coverage of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia — will undergo a major restructuring that insiders describe as one of the deepest cuts in the paper’s history. International coverage is also being slashed, with multiple foreign bureaus closing or downsizing, though a handful will remain open.

The layoffs have been anticipated for weeks. Tensions escalated after leadership quietly informed staff that no reporters would be sent to cover the Winter Olympics this month, a decision that sparked outrage inside the newsroom before being partially reversed. That episode only reinforced the sense that the Post was in retreat.

Publisher Will Lewis has privately told colleagues that the paper must find a path back to profitability by narrowing its focus, prioritizing politics and a limited set of core areas while pulling back from sports, books, and large swaths of foreign reporting. That strategy alarmed journalists across the newsroom, prompting multiple letters to owner Jeff Bezos urging him not to hollow out the institution.

One letter, obtained by CNN and signed by White House bureau chief Matt Viser and seven other reporters, warned that even political coverage — the Post’s crown jewel — would suffer if other sections were gutted.

“If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics,” the reporters wrote, “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.”