Newspaper Deathwatch
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From David Bauder of The Associated Press:
The Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff Wednesday, eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage in a widespread purge that represented a brutal blow to journalism and one of its most legendary brands.
Rumors of layoffs had circulated for weeks, ever since word leaked that sports reporters who had expected to travel to Italy for the Winter Olympics would not be going. But when official word came down, the size and scale of the cuts were shocking, affecting virtually every department in the newsroom.
Gutting the sports section in a year when the World Cup in coming to the U.S. and days before The Super Bowl. Not to mention as Trump has an IndyCar race coming to the nation’s capitol.
Angela Fu at Poynter carries on with the story:
Roughly a third of Post employees were laid off, including more than 300 of the 800-person newsroom, CNN and The New York Times reported. The layoffs mark the most extensive cuts at the Post in years and follow a period of sustained financial losses, leadership turnover and controversial editorial decisions.
Among those laid off Wednesday were those covering race and ethnicity; national health; protest movements, activism and extremism; Maryland education; and Amazon. Foreign correspondents covering Cairo and the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, Sydney and international investigations were also let go.
It’s personal for Ashley Parker at The Atlantic with the headline “The Murder of The Washington Post:”
Journalism is—has always been—a tough industry. But I watched firsthand as Bezos, Lewis, and company spoke in turgid corporate-ese (“Fix it, build it, scale it”) and failed to launch—or even attempt to launch—initiatives that might achieve their grandiose visions. They began 2025 by unveiling the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of jumping from about 2.5 million subscribers to 200 million paying users, despite having ended the previous year hemorrhaging tens of thousands of their existing subscribers, all while blaming the journalists for the paper’s travails.
Brian Seltzer of CNN’s Reliable Sources talks of the developing story:
Despite his unfathomably deep pockets, Jeff Bezos values profitability more than he values the people at The Washington Post.
That’s one potential takeaway as the Post conducts steep layoffs today, delivering a severe blow to the Bezos-owned institution. We’re still piecing the details together, and updating this CNN.com story with more info as we get it, but one in three staffers across the company are being “impacted,” which is PR-speak for laid off.
On a Zoom call at 8:30am, editor Matt Murray said the cuts include “restructuring” the Metro desk, shutting down almost the entire Sports section, shuttering the Books section, cancelling the daily “Post Reports” podcast, and “shrinking” the paper’s presence around the world.
Then, at 9 a.m., staffers received emails indicating whether they’d be laid off. “I’m out, along with just a ton of the best in the biz. Horrible,” the Post’s Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan wrote on X. Too many other Post reporters took to social media to reveal the same.
Bezos and his handpicked publisher, Will Lewis, have yet to comment.
As noted above The New York Times is also covering the massacre.
Reporters Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Erik Wemple check in for The Times (or here):
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 Times provides a chart of the digital traffic of The Post, The Times, and The Wall Street Journal:
The New York Times is not seeing the same problems as The Washington Post.
The company reported total revenue of $802.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2025, up 10.4 percent from a year earlier.
The Times’ Katie Robertson today reported on that newspapers’ fortunes (or here):
The New York Times added 1.4 million digital-only subscribers in 2025, including about 450,000 in the last quarter of the year, the company said on Wednesday.
The Times ended the year with 12.78 million total subscribers, a jump that puts it on a pace to reach its stated goal of 15 million by the end of 2027.
Joshua Benton at NiemanLab checked in on their regular ranking of the top 25 local newspaper websites in the United States for the last three months of 2025 with the headline and subhead of:
The Providence Journal saw its web traffic soar 279% at the end of 2025
Other big gainers included dailies in Milwaukee, Harrisburg, and Columbus. Here’s our regular ranking of the top 25 local newspaper websites in the United States.
Here are the top 5 of the 25 from their December 2025 chart:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is also ridding itself of journalists. From that paper’s J Scott Trubey:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday evening said it will lay off staffers in the newsroom and other segments of the business as it seeks to cut costs and marshal resources to invest in its growth.
Approximately 50 positions willbe cut, about 15% of the AJC’s headcount. About half of those laid off will come from the newsroom, the AJC’s largest department.
The AJC has spent the past few years transitioning from a traditional newspaper into a modern media company. On Dec. 31, the AJC published its final print edition after 157 years but continues to be a vital source of news on its flagship website, AJC.com, on its mobile app, in videos, podcasts, social media and its ePaper.
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