Last week’s news about steep layoffs at the Washington Post is troubling for one of journalism’s flagship properties, for journalism in general, and the state of democracy.

It’s possible to see the layoffs — some 300 unionized newsroom staff plus dozens of non-unionized journalists — as part of a decade-long trend across the country. According to a Pew Research article from 2021, U.S. newsroom employment has fallen 26% since 2008. The main exceptions seem to be The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Until last week, there was a third exception, The Washington Post.

But there are several problems with the Post‘s recent layoffs.

1. Laying off 30% of your staff is an unrecoverable event from an HR perspective. Other papers, including the Journal, have had layoffs or buyouts, but not at that level. In fact, despite smaller rounds of layoffs since 2006, the Journal‘s newsroom is now above what it was in 2006. But it’s hard to recover from shedding 300+ journalists. Journalists will think twice about joining a paper that clearly has stopped investing in its newsroom.
2. Laying off 300+ journalists means a significant loss of expertise. The Post lost reporters who had won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting and criticism. They lost reporters who understood their beats and had developed contacts over the years. They’ve lost people who served as mentors to junior staff, too. This expertise is what readers look for in the Post (and other newspapers). Mentoring has helped the Post develop younger reporters.
3. Fewer reporters mean less accountability offederal and local governments. We’ve listed this as #3 but we’re living at a time when reporting closely on what our government is doing has never been more important. We know the complaints that so-called corporate media has been somewhat complicit — such as when White House reporters are singled out as being terrible reporters who should smile more, and no other reporter in the room speaks up to support the targeted reporter or when reporters don’t push back on clearly false or misleading statements or when they highlight culture-war topics that are rage bait and generate engagement via social media or comments sections. There’s a firehouse of breaking news that’s hard to keep up with, and we need reporters to sift through, report and put into perspective everything that’s going on. We know some top media are doing their best to stay on top over every but it becomes much harder to do after you’ve lost about 40% of your newsroom.  By the way, Heather Cox Richardson does a terrific job on Facebook of providing multidisciplinary perspectives on the day’s news and includes links to all her sources.
4. This bloodletting isn’t about saving money but could be about something else. Jeff Bezos ranked #4 on the Forbes 400, worth approx. $233 billion. Obviously that’s a lot of money. In January 2025, the Journal predicted that annual losses at the Post could total $100 million per year. Over a decade, that would generate $1 billion in losses. Bezos is 62. Over the next two decades, when he’s 82, losses at that level would reach $2 billion — leaving him with $231 billion to fritter away however else he chooses. Now, of course, Bezos can spend his money any way he’d like but when you purchase The Washington Post, you’re buying into something special. Something that goes beyond profits. And it’s concerning that the country’s #4th-wealthiest person has decided to make huge, irreversible cuts to one of the country’s most important media companies. We’re not conspiratorially minded. But just like it seemed like it was no mere coincidence when, in 2024, Bezos vetoed having the Post endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president — because Bezos apparently had a sense that Trump was going to win re-election. Particularly after Bezos’ direct financial payments to Melania for her eponymous documentary, the timing and nature of the Post‘s layoffs ahead of a crucial midterm election, when many polls show Americans are upset with the country’s direction—check out a recent Gallup poll showing 74% are dissatisfied—also seem suspicious. By the way, it’s important to note that for several years, including during Biden’s administration, Gallup reported a similar percentage of Americans were dissatisfied with America’s direction. This speaks to why it’s critical to continue to hold the government accountable, regardless of who sits in the White House.) By the way, some of the cuts included losses at international bureaus in Cairo, Jerusalem, and Ukraine, as well as offices in China, India, and Australia. Those are critically important regions to suddenly unfollow.

5. Here’s what Peggy Noonan described it, writing in the Journal, A Lament for the Washington Post – WSJ: “The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” She further notes, “The Post’s greatness and expertise can’t easily be replaced and perhaps can’t be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building…And this will have an impact on our democracy.”

6. Holding power to account is important–but not only for politicians. Writing in his new Substack, former Post tech reviewer/reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler, “The truth about covering tech at Bezos’ Washington Post,” mentions that newspapers can help tell the truth not only about governments but also about technology. Fowler’s tech columns were “frequently among the Post’s most read and shared, helped tens of millions of readers. The work prompted changes to products and policy… Tech leaders who value independent thinking know this sort of critique helps them make better products and decisions.” That’s another reason journalists are important. Check out “The Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper,” which are (as of the time we published this blog) available on the Post‘s website, and were written by Eugene Meyer, the Post‘s owner, in 1935.
7. By shedding 40% of its journalists, the Post provides fewer reasons for people to subscribe.  By comparison, the Times has invested in new features, sections and offerings, and those investments seem to be paying off. But by offering subscribers 40% less content, the Post has many fewer reasons for readers to renew and support it. This is likely to be a downward spiral. Fewer content offerings result in subscription losses, leading to additional layoffs and related costs.
8. Many talented journalists will move to Substack to continue their careers — and that means it will be harder for readers to find them, cost more to read, and lead to further fragmentation. Who knows where they will land? Newsrooms have shrunk 56% since 2006 so many are not going to be able to shift to another newspaper. One problem with fragmenting media is that it can degrade the quality of information because there will be so many different versions of insight and reported facts.  (We wrote about that as part of our trends for 2025, here.) Click here to read journalist Ted Brown’s LinkedIn post that goes into more details about the migration to Substack.
9. This loss further destabilizes the industry. The Post‘s sports section was cut because they say readers have many other sources for sports-related info. While that’s true, fans like reading local coverage of their hometown teams. Someone from outside the region are less likely to undestand the nature of that region’s fandom. Also, as we wrote in our earlier blog about the death of book reviews, the Post‘s was the second standalone section still being published. Now we’re left with just one, the New York Times’, and we think that book reviews in most newspapers will fade away, which does a disservice to people interested in books.

Here’s a problem for the future of journalism–as promised in the headline of this blog.

According to Business Insider, Bezos said, “The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity. Each and every day, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.”

We understand it’s important to cover news that interests readers. But it seems that the Post is abdicating its responsibility by deferring its news judgment to clicks, shares and likes. The media were once called the Fourth Estate because they serve as a crucial, independent check on power. But publishing only popular news could allow important news to fly under the radar if readers aren’t interested in how the legislative sausage is made. We’re not saying to ignore data about what interests readers. But we’re also saying news organizations shouldn’t ignore significant news so that they can continue to speak truth to power.

For more about the impact of the Post, check out “An Elegy for My Washington Post” written by Times opnion columnist Carlos Lozado. And also check out Peggy Noonan’s column, A Lament for the Washington Post – WSJ, which notes: “The most powerful capital in the world has no major fully functioning newspaper. That’s a huge absence.”