Outside the Beltway

The Slow Death of the Washington Post

A great newspaper is suffering another round of cutbacks.

James Joyner · Thursday, February 5, 2026 · 6 comments

The veteran journalist Ruth Marcus details “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post.”

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Newspapers have been struggling to find a viable business model since the Internet became the hub of the information space over a quarter-century ago. The end of local monopolies on information crushed the old advertising-supported model. And, ironically, the papers themselves helped fuel the expectation that news coverage should be free when they started publishing online.

People are understandably frustrated with Bezos:

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The Post is reportedly hemorrhaging some $100 million a year. If it were an ordinary business, these cuts wouldn’t be a surprise. But it’s a vanity side project for one of the wealthiest men on the planet. $100 million is pocket change to him. Hell, his ex-wife has given away some $60 billion since their divorce.

A retired journalist speculated on Facebook yesterday that this was about managing the estate. While Bezos may be passionate about the enterprise, he may not want to saddle his wife, four children, and three stepchildren with an asset that’s losing so much money. But he’s only 62 years old; it’s a little early to be getting his affairs in order. And he could endow a charitable trust that could sustain a $100 million annual loss indefinitely for $2 billion. His net worth has fluctuated more than that in the time it took me to type this paragraph.

But, of course, it’s his money. And, despite the headline assertion that Bezos “brought down” the paper, it’s quite likely he kept it afloat for 13 years longer than it otherwise would. It’s not like there was a long line of people willing to put that kind of cash into a failing enterprise. Indeed, Marcos acknowledges, “I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner.

Then again, longtime Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins, now with the NYT-owned Athletic, isn’t wrong here:

Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

From a business standpoint, the cuts make some short-term sense. But, at some point, it’s no longer a major newspaper. We’re dangerously close to that point, if it hasn’t already happened.

One could argue, for example, that a prestige Sports section is a vestige of a bygone era. Fans can gets scores in real time on their phones nowadays and there are so many niche outlets out there doing deep dives on particular teams and niches. Still, for a paper that until recently employed the likes of Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, and John Feinstein, it’s quite a shock to essentially close shop.

The World desk is another matter entirely. One can’t be truly informed without having some sense of what’s happening in other countries. But maintaining foreign bureaus is expensive and, alas, most Americans just aren’t interested.

UPDATE: Regular commenter @Moosebreath observes,

Missing in this analysis is the recent coziness between Bezos and Trump, as well as the strong rightward turn the paper has taken in recent years, causing many of its subscribers (myself included) to flee. The monetary losses, after years of stability, may have been a result.

Middle East scholar Monica Marks thinks the same, and offers this graph by way of evidence:

Whatever the cause or rationale for that change in editorial policy, which no doubt offended a core group of the Post‘s subscribers, the paper’s financial woes long predate the change or, indeed, Bezos’s acquisition. Aside from a short period fueled by the Trump phenomenon, the paper has been losing massive amounts of money for at least two decades.

The retired reporter referenced above puts it this way:

Subscriptions began diving after Biden was elected. The rage that fueled circulation disappeared alongside Trump. You see the same effect not only at the NYT but at most left-leaning periodicals, many of which went bust.

So, why did NYT succeed and they fizzled? Bundling! Reporters never like to hear this, but Wordle, the Athletic, Wirecutter, etc., keep the hard newshounds employed. NYT sells them as packages, giving subscribers an affirmative reason to spend their money.

Which, ironically, is what newspapers always did. Yes, advertising, not subscriptions, paid most of the freight. But it offered news, sports, lifestyle features, crosswords, comics, obituaries, weather, television listings, etc. You pretty much had to take the local paper. That’s no longer the case and yet publishers have to figure out how to make it with subscription fees alone.