The Penny Drops: WaPo on Life Support As Big Layoffs Start?

Has the Washington Post entered into a death spiral? Or has Jeff Bezos decided to right-size it to its income after several years of significant losses?

And is there any difference between the two?

Executive editor Matt Murray held a staff meeting today, in which he apparently not just lowered the boom but lowered several booms. According to leaks from the meeting, Murray – brought in less than two years ago from the Wall Street Journal – informed staff that the paper would shed several features, including sports coverage, and pull back on its foreign reporting. 

This news understandably did not land well with the Post’s employees:

WaPo’s Matt Murray told staff the paper is shuttering its sports section, moving remaining staff to features, shrinking foreign coverage, restructuring metro, closing books coverage, suspending Post Reports podcast

“Whole company now waiting for a live or die email” one staffer…

— Natalie Korach (@NatalieKorach) February 4, 2026

“Live or die”? The Wrap followed up by reporting on Murray’s “strategic reset,” and explaining what “live or die” means:

Executive editor Matt Murray framed the moves to staff in a Wednesday morning meeting as a “strategic reset,” the sources said. He did not announce how many jobs will be affected.

“These moves are painful,” Murray said. “This is a tough day.”

HR chief Wayne Connell told staff they’ll receive an email saying whether or not they’re roles have been eliminated.

The paper has already undergone more than one round of layoffs and has shed a few features along the way, but this looks much more like a complete reorganization. If the scope of the changes matches the leaks, the Post will come out the other side much more of a Beltway paper than a major national daily. In fact, it might leave that market entirely to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The Wrap’s source is unhappy with the paper’s management, as one can expect, but also appears to have a short memory:

Murray took no questions during the short meeting, which rankled staff.

“This was handled with cowardice,” one longtime staff told TheWrap. “Washington Post executives took no ownership this morning for the questionable strategic and business decisions they have made that put the Post behind.”

That’s not actually true. Even CNN felt obliged to remind its readers that the Post’s publisher Will Lewis warned Post staff about its unsustainable path and the need to broaden its reach and appeal, and so did owner Jeff Bezos. Well, sorta:

The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, has spoken privately about finding a path to profitability for the Post by focusing the paper’s investment on politics and a few other key areas, while cutting back in areas like sports and foreign affairs. …

A year ago, Bezos outlined a new vision for the Post’s once-esteemed opinion section, promoting libertarian ideals, including free markets and personal liberties. That decision led opinion editor David Shipley to exit the company.

Bezos’ change came months after he canceled a planned editorial page endorsement of Kamala Harris in late 2024. That decision led to mass cancellations from subscribers, hurting the Post’s bottom line.

Ahem. I’ll pass on the editorializing over “once-esteemed opinion section,” which hasn’t been true in the years since it mainly turned into the Several Flavors of Orange Man Bad section. CNN has the timeline wrong as well. Both Lewis and Murray warned the staff in June 2024, not February 2025, that the Washington Post was on a collision course with collapse. Lewis and Murray informed them at that time that the paper had lost half its audience in the previous three years and had lost $77 million in 2023 alone. 

What was the response from the staff at that point? Oh, yeah:

When Washington Post publisher Will Lewis and new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff Monday, the newsroom was still coming to terms with the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021.

“Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

Lewis warned in response that he wasn’t going to stick with the plan that involved losing $77 million a year to float a vanity project for progressive activists:

At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

Ever since, the staff has not just resisted Lewis’ efforts, but they have repeatedly demanded that Bezos intervene on their behalf to reverse Lewis’ policies. Meanwhile, the performance of the Post has not improved, even though Lewis did make an effort to rebalance the opinion section, which has not done much to correct the newspaper’s course. That turned out to be a very small plug for a very large hole in the Post’s boat.

Bezos did not accumulate his fortune by dumping his wealth into sinkholes for an extended period of time. He and Lewis have tried to bring the Post back to profitability, or at least something close to a break-even status, while its staff balked over its DEI demands and progressive agendas. Downsizing is the inevitable result, and anyone surprised at the outcome simply refused to pay attention. The only question now is whether downsizing will be enough, and thus far, the signs are not encouraging. 

My friend John Ondrasik sums up the problem:

I do not delight in the dispatch of dutiful defenders of Democracy at the @washingtonpost but its downfall was destined the day they deemed this daft dictum didactic. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/dU4lSC8gXu

— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) February 4, 2026

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