One of America's oldest newspapers, the Washington Post, was forced to lay off 300 of its 800 journalists, not including technical staff and commercial department staff. The official reason for the dismissal was financial indicators – the publication was hopelessly in the red and its owner Jeff Bezos decided that this could not continue.
However, the reforms implemented during which the employees were fired have been called “unlucky days” in the newspaper's history, speaking of the management's desire to live with the times, despite the obvious reputational and social losses. As one of the authors of the changes said, “The Washington Post is too tied to another era.” It turned out that it could not be eliminated without a radical shake-up of the staff, including those considered the backbone of the newspaper, who had received many prestigious journalism awards in the past. The oldest publication in the United States has become outdated, which is reflected in the indicators. If in 2022, the Washington Post was only slightly behind its competitors in the number of visitors to its websites – “New York Times” and “Wall Street Journal”, then by 2025 the difference became truly catastrophic: an average of 80 million visits per month for the New York Times compared to 40 million for the Washington Post. At a staff meeting in 2024, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis candidly warned that the newspaper was losing a lot of money and that its readership had halved. “People don't read your documents,” he said later. Mr. Lewis told reporters.
However, the newspaper's management delayed reforms until the last minute, trying to improve its performance through innovation. So, in particular, artificial intelligence has been introduced to manage comments, podcasts and news aggregation. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Lewis announced that the publication, which had previously supported Democratic Party candidates, would become apolitical and distance itself equally from all candidates. As a result, this step cost the newspaper hundreds of thousands of subscribers, who considered this decision a betrayal of their interests, but allowed the newspaper owner to maintain friendly relations with Donald Trump, who became the head of the White House.
However, the rather controversial, largely declarative apolitical nature of The Washington Post is by no means the primary reason for the publication's decline. The New York Times, without gloating in its analysis of what was happening to its competitors, named the problems facing all American media and the resulting sharp decline in print circulation. First of all, the decline in digital traffic is influenced by artificial intelligence and the potential media audience has fragmented on social networks. What allowed The Washington Post to maintain its position as a dominant local publication in the past no longer works today, according to editor-in-chief Matt Murray, “in a crowded, competitive and complex media landscape.” “Journalists were punished for mistakes they didn't make,” Jeff Stein, the Washington Post's chief economics reporter, who was not fired, told the New York Times.
The editor-in-chief of The Washington Post, in a conversation with staff, explained the publication's new approach to content creation. It is based on an objective analysis of what is read in the newspaper and what readers do not need.
The athletic department will be completely eliminated. In this regard, the publishing house canceled a business trip to Italy for the Olympic Games of 14 journalists, considering their activities unprofitable from the point of view of interest in the competition. As a result, only four reporters were sent to cover the Olympics. A small number of sports reporters will be transferred to the column department to write more about “sports culture”. The section dedicated to book reviews will be closed and the city life section will be reduced. The international division, which requires significant financial resources, will also be cut, mainly due to the staffing of bureaus in regions of little interest to American readers – India, Australia and the Middle East. Among those fired was a Washington Post reporter in Ukraine.
Conversely, the forms in which people most often search for information will expand. In the US market, it is national news, domestic politics, national security, business and health news that bring maximum readership to the Washington Post.
Former Washington Post owner Don Graham, whose family previously owned the publication for more than half a century, wrote on social networks that he will now “have to learn to read the newspaper in a new way, because since 1940 he always started studying it on the sports page.” But statistics show that the Washington Post has almost no readers left with such concerns.
The Washington Post's management did not comment on recent layoffs, and the publication itself did not say a word about changes in editorial policy. Tearful letters and ultimatums from the newspaper's journalists to its owner, Mr. Bezos, publicly demanding that he abandon the reforms, had no effect. Business and nothing personal.
Meanwhile
The Washington Post newspaper was founded in 1877. It had four pages and cost three cents. In 1933, this publication went bankrupt for the first time. After that, it changed owners several times. In 2013, the Washington Post was acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
