Last week, Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez went to the Schiaparelli show at Paris Fashion Week. They’ve somewhat successfully infiltrated these elite cultural spaces, mostly by buying their way into cultural access. They are patrons of this year’s Met Gala as well, and Lauren really, really wants to be a fashionista and accepted in Vogue/Anna Wintour circles. Anyway, as they arrived at PFW, there were widespread rumors in the media world that the Bezos-owned Washington Post would soon begin laying off a good percentage of their staff. Well, after Jeff and Lauren paid people to kiss their asses in Paris, Jeff returned stateside and began ripping apart the Post.
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage. The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.
The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast. Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.
Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.
Here are the sections with the biggest damage: the book/publishing section; all international bureaus; photojournalism (apparently all or most of the WaPo photographers were fired?); sports and a “restructuring” of the Metro section. The Post apparently doesn’t think there’s any need for sports coverage just days before the start of the Winter Olympics AND the Super Bowl. And just months away from the US co-hosting the World Cup?? There were WaPo journalists in active warzones (like Ukraine) who got fired via text on Wednesday morning.
As for why all of this is happening, it’s no big secret if you were paying attention in 2023 and 2024. Late 2023 was when Bezos brought in Will Lewis as the new publisher of the Post. Lewis is British, and his background was primarily in the Rupert Murdoch-owned British publications. Lewis was up to his ass in ALL of the British media’s hacking/blagging issues. But Lewis was brought in specifically to try to push WaPo into more conservative, pro-Trump political coverage. On that, Lewis was explicitly doing Jeff Bezos’ bidding. When Bezos and Lewis pulled the Post’s presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, the sh-t hit the fan. They saw a mass exodus of subscribers and readers. Instead of Bezos and Lewis blaming themselves for their own sh-tty decision-making at all levels, they blamed the Post’s journalists and editors for not being Trumpy enough to entice a new readership.
Also: Bezos is a billionaire who could easily run WaPo at a loss for decades to come and it would make no noticeable impact on his wealth. After all, this is a man who just wasted $100 million on Melania Trump’s documentary, which bombed completely. Hell is not hot enough for Jeff Bezos.
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