The Washington Post laid off roughly one in three employees across the company on Wednesday morning, dealing a major blow to a newsroom that many staffers say had already reached a breaking point.
Post owner Jeff Bezos did not immediately comment on the layoffs.
Bezos has been pressuring the Post’s leadership to return the newspaper to profitability, but many journalists have criticized his strategy and questioned his motives. Former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote earlier this week that “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”
Bezos and Amazon, the company he founded, maintain complicated relationships with the Trump administration. Earlier this week, Bezos hosted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, the space company he owns.
Employees had been bracing for layoffs for weeks. On Wednesday morning, staff were told to “stay home today” as notifications were sent out to those affected.
“These moves include substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments,” Executive Editor Matt Murray said in an internal memo.
According to sources at the paper, the cuts dramatically shrink the Metro desk, shut down nearly the entire Sports section, close the Books section, and cancel the daily Post Reports podcast. International coverage is also being significantly reduced, though some overseas bureaus will remain open in what Murray described as a “strategic overseas presence.”
Major reductions are also affecting the business side of the organization.
Murray said the restructuring “will help to secure our future in service of our journalistic mission and provide us stability moving forward,” a claim many staffers greeted with skepticism.
Staff Reacts
Journalists began sharing reactions on social media as the layoffs unfolded.
“I’m out, along with just a ton of the best in the biz. Horrible,” wrote Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan on X.
Race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton confirmed he was laid off, writing: “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.”
Publisher Will Lewis has privately discussed a plan to refocus the Post on politics and a handful of core areas, while scaling back coverage of sports, foreign affairs, and other sections. That strategy prompted reporters to send impassioned letters to Bezos warning that shrinking other departments would weaken the entire newsroom.
In one letter obtained by CNN, White House bureau chief Matt Viser and seven other reporters warned that political coverage depends heavily on collaboration with other desks.
“If other sections are diminished, we all are,” the letter said.
Despite the objections, the plan moved forward.
In a staff-wide memo Wednesday, Murray outlined the Post’s new priorities, including politics, national affairs, national security, science and technology, health and climate, investigative journalism, lifestyle and advice reporting, and coverage of culture and trends.
‘Among the Darkest Days’
Former executive editor Marty Baron, who led the newsroom until his retirement in 2021, called the layoffs “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Baron acknowledged the Post faced serious business challenges but said those problems were “made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.”
He cited the loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers, including after Bezos blocked a planned editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in late 2024 — a move that sparked widespread cancellations.
Baron also criticized what he described as Bezos’s efforts to curry favor with Trump. He pointed to Bezos’s recent push to reshape the opinion section around libertarian ideals, a decision that led to the departure of opinion editor David Shipley.
“When I was there, Bezos often said that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life,” Baron wrote. “I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”