Posted on 01/07/2025 10:44:05 AM PST by Red Badger
The Washington Post began laying off a chunk of its workforce on Tuesday, cutting figures on the business side of the company.
The cuts did not affect the newsroom. About 4% of the company, or less than 100 people, will be laid off across its business divisions, Fox News Digital has learned. The layoffs, beginning Tuesday, were first reported by the New York Times.
"The Washington Post is continuing its transformation to meet the needs of the industry, build a more sustainable future and reach audiences where they are," a Post spokesperson said. "Changes across our business functions are all in service of our greater goal to best position The Post for the future."
A source familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital earlier this week that, while newsroom staffers were exempted from the forthcoming layoffs, "morale is just horrible" under publisher Will Lewis due to an exodus of talent leaving for jobs at different outlets, as well as heavy financial losses and dwindling traffic.
The layoffs come one year after The Post implemented mass buyouts. It was reported that 240 staffers took exit packages, preventing a round of layoffs at the time.
It was reported last fall that The Post was on pace to lose $77 million in 2024, and that estimate came before the paper shed a jarring 250,000 subscribers as part of the liberal outrage over the paper's move to not endorse a presidential candidate in the election, a decision made by its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.
The Post editorial board had been set, to no one's surprise, to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris before Bezos intervened. Since it began offering White House endorsements in 1976, the paper has backed the Democratic candidate in every race except 1988, when it didn't endorse anyone.
Several of the paper's high-profile staffers have announced departures for other outlets in recent weeks, including reporters Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Tyler Page and LeeAnn Caldwell, columnist Charles Lane and editor Matea Gold.
The Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes also resigned last week from the paper after her bosses rejected her illustration depicting Bezos groveling to President-elect Donald Trump.
Fox News Digital also learned of The Post's plans to reassign its "gender columnist" Monica Hesse after a piece she had written was "killed" by editors.
Bezos previously alluded to making reforms at the paper in an op-ed defending the non-endorsement decision.
"Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose," Bezos wrote in October. "Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility."
“We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
Nowhere to go but up.
There was a time when the WaPo's high-profile staffers, on the other side though they were, would all have been people with whom most of us would be familiar.
Those times seem almost impossibly ancient. And it's not because most of us are getting old.
A newspaper’s job is not to ‘control’ anything. Just report the damn news, else you have no credibility at all...........
I got a kick out of seeing this story on CFP, right below Trump’s announcement of a $20BN investment in the USA.
Trump up, Wapo down.
Parakeets deeply saddened
I guess losing 15% of your subscriber base due to decisions made by the paper’s owner does not hurt the owner, but does hurt everyone who works at the paper.
Does anyone read or trust the Post?
Paper or plastic?
Closing the unnecessary AR department? No revenue.
Welcome to Walmart...................
Pity, that. I'm holding out for public floggings and reinstituting galley slavery for them.
I wonder if the new DC cardinal has an issue with this development?
let me kamala word-salad that for you:
“We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our control.”
The cost for MUSK to buy WaPo gets lower & lower.
How much staff does it take to get the daily DNC, AP and Reuters talking point memos and publish them?
I mean that seriously.
What % of WaPo (or most MSM) is actually in house generated content and NOT verbatim transcriptions?
well, elon fired 80% of the twitter employees and nothing bad happened ...
But their paper has “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on top.
How can we make it now without that “talent” that is being lost?
Maybe a service that has AI compose anti-Trump slanders and slurs. “Convicted felon Donald Trump in an already disproven statement falsely said today....”
Production staff or “talent”? Or both?
The price of liberalism keeps going up and it’s a good thing.
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