Washington Post announces sweeping layoffs, scaling back news coverage

2026-02-05 - 06:39

The Washington Post has announced it is laying off one-third of its work force, sharply scaling back the paper’s coverage of sports and foreign news. The cuts, announced on Wednesday, will impact employees across departments with roles in the newsroom’s sports, local and foreign sections hit particularly hard. It marks the latest upheaval for the leading US newspaper, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Executive editor Matt Murray said the cuts would bring “stability”. But the announcement was met with condemnation from the paper’s employees and some former leaders, one of whom described it as among the “darkest days in the history of” the storied newspaper. “Today’s news is painful. These are difficult actions,” Murray wrote in a note to staff on Wednesday. “If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition.” In his explanation of the cuts, Murray said that the paper’s online traffic had plummeted in the last three years amid the artificial intelligence boom, and that it was “too rooted in a different era”. “Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said. Ahead of the announcement, foreign correspondents and local reporters had pleaded with Bezos to preserve their jobs. “Continuing to eliminate workers only stands to weaken the newspaper, drive away readers and undercut