The Washington Post announced on Wednesday that it is laying off hundreds of its employees, which marks one of the newspaper’s deepest workforce cuts in its history.
This development is part of a broader trend as legacy media outlets are rapidly losing viewers and readers.
From CNN:
Executive Editor Matt Murray and human resources chief Wayne Connell sent an email to staffers Wednesday morning instructing employees to “stay home today” but attend an 8:30 a.m. ET meeting via Zoom during which the Washington Post’s leadership will announce “significant actions across the company.”
Those actions include shutting down almost the entire Sports section, closing the Books section and cancelling the daily Post Reports podcast, sources at the newspaper said.
One of the most severe cuts comes in the form of a “restructuring” of the Post’s Metro desk, which covers D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
The Post’s international coverage will also be markedly reduced, though some bureaus outside the US will remain open.
Widespread layoffs at the Post have been expected for several weeks, especially after leadership told staff in an internal memo that they no longer planned to send any reporters to the Winter Olympics this month — a decision that was ultimately reversed.
The layoffs are expected to affect hundreds of journalists across multiple departments, including local news and international issues, according to The New York Times. The daily “Post Reports” podcast is shutting down, as well as the Metro section, which covers Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
Multiple reports suggest as many as 300 employees might lose their jobs in the purge. During the Zoom meeting, The Post’s editors told members of its foreign staff that up to half of the media outlet’s newsroom could face deep cuts.
Chief Executive Officer Will Lewis said the layoffs are part of a strategy to make the newspaper profitable by focusing resources on political reporting and a few other areas while scaling back on international and sports coverage. NPR reported that he told others that the newspaper had lost $177 million over the last two years and that public interest in its reporting had declined.
⚠️ The failed news outlet @washingtonpost is expected to lay off 300 of its 1,000 employees, removing the whole Sports department. pic.twitter.com/9gHpvCT6fd
— Freedom 🇺🇸 (@MrCaseyLandry) February 4, 2026
When Jeff Bezos first acquired The Washington Post in 2013, he expanded operations and invested heavily in the outlet. But recent years have seen drastic financial losses, a severe increase in subscriber cancellations, and a mass exodus of top talent.
The situation worsened when Bezos announced that The Post would not endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. This decision alone cost the outlet over 250,000 digital subscribers. This represented about ten percent of the paper’s readership at the time.
But it wasn’t just the Kamala Harris issue that has contributed to The Post’s problems. Internal data shared with Semafor revealed that the outlet’s daily digital traffic plunged during the Biden years. In January 2021, the Post had about 22.5 million daily active users. By mid-2024, that number had fallen to between 2.5 and 3 million daily users. This is an 87 percent decline over three years.
But The Washington Post is not alone.
The newspaper’s decline reflects wider trends occurring in legacy media across the country. A Northwestern University report showed that about 136 newspapers have closed their doors in the past year alone. Since 2005, the U.S. has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers — about 2,500 publications. It is on track to lose more than a third by next year.
U.S. Census Bureau data revealed that newspaper revenue has dropped from $46.2 billion in 2002 to $22.1 billion in 2020 — a 50 percent decline. Much of this is due to advertisers relying more on Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon instead of newspapers.
But it is not only competition that is killing the Post and other legacy media outlets. It’s also a distinct decline in public trust. With its pivot, the Post alienated many readers that wanted to consume anti-Trump content every day. It also failed to pick up readers on the right to make up for the losses.
There is also the fact that a growing number of Americans are favoring digital and social media over traditional news outlets. This is especially true of younger generations. The newspaper industry relied heavily on digital subscriptions. But the high prices have turned them into luxury goods that only the wealthy and highly educated can easily afford. Nobody wants to pay exorbitant prices to read information they could easily get on X or other platforms.
If the Post and other legacy outlets don’t figure out how to adapt to the digital era, they will soon take their place in the ash heap of journalistic history.