The Washington Post to lay off 30% of staff...Bezos goes from savior to destroyer of the paper in 13 years

According to Financial News, The Washington Post (WP) has begun the largest restructuring in its history, cutting about one-third of its total staff. Thirteen years after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper, this mass layoff is being seen as a shocking move that fundamentally shakes the identity and role of one of America’s flagship legacy newspapers.
On the 4th local time, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that The Washington Post would carry out large-scale layoffs, focusing on its sports, local, and foreign desks. In an internal memo, Executive Editor Matt Murray called it “a painful but necessary decision to ensure the paper’s sustainability,” adding, “We need to overhaul both our journalism and our business model.” He also noted, “Online traffic has plunged since the spread of artificial intelligence (AI), and the paper has remained stuck for too long in another era.”
The most symbolic change is the cutback in sports and foreign coverage. The sports section will be shut down in its current form, and the foreign desk will shrink from more than 20 bureaus to about 12. A former Cairo bureau chief said that all Middle East correspondents and editors had been dismissed, while a reporter based in Ukraine lamented, “I lost my job in the middle of a war.” The Metro desk, which covered news in the Washington, D.C. area, is also undergoing cuts so deep that it is effectively being dismantled.
Internal backlash has been fierce. The Washington Post union criticized the move, saying, “Relentlessly cutting staff only undermines the mission of the paper.” Former Executive Editor Marty Baron described the situation as “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Analysts say this restructuring effectively marks the failure of the growth strategy Bezos promised when he acquired The Washington Post in 2013 under the banner of providing a “financial runway.” The paper posted losses of about 77 million dollars in 2023 and around 100 million dollars in 2024, sharply increasing financial pressure.
The financial deterioration is intertwined with disputes over editorial independence. After management moved to reshape the opinion pages around “individual liberty and free markets,” internal resistance mounted and the executive editor resigned. Former editor Marty Baron argued, “Bezos cost the paper more than 250,000 subscribers with his cowardly order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election. That led to a self-inflicted destruction of the brand.” Former columnist Ruth Marcus also alleged, “To avoid clashes with the Trump administration, Bezos has pushed the opinion section to the right and censored critical voices.”
The Washington Post’s current troubles stand in stark contrast to its rival, The New York Times (NYT). The New York Times has diversified into service journalism, built a subscriber base of 13 million, and is generating more than 192 million dollars in operating profit.
Marcus pointed out, “Bezos’s wealth is estimated to have grown from 25 billion dollars at the time of the acquisition to about 250 billion dollars today,” adding, “Dedicating just 1% of that would be enough to sustain the paper permanently.”

km@fnnews.com Reporter Kim Kyung-min Reporter