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As someone who has a great fondness for newspapers — I delivered them when I was a teenager, and, being mostly deaf now, I have to read the news, not watch it on television — I was greatly pleased when billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post from the Graham family, which could no longer afford to keep it running, saving the newspaper from disaster. We previously noted that while Mr Bezos has a currently guesstimated net worth of $248.5 billion, a mere single-digit billionaire like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns The Los Angeles Times, and his paltry $8.1 billion had to cut costs as his newspaper was hemorrhaging money.
It seems, however, that while Mr Bezos can afford the money losses at the Post, he appears to have decided that he needs to reduce the blood loss.
Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments is being laid off
Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated.
Wednesday, February 4, 2026 | 9:57 AM EST | Updated: 10:19 AM EST
The Washington Post is laying off one-third of its staff in the newsroom and other departments, a brutal blow at one of journalism’s most legendary brands.
The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas. The changes were announced by executive editor Matt Murray in a Zoom meeting with staff.
The staff reduction is a significant psychic blow at the Post, known in history books for its Watergate revelations and most recently for aggressive coverage of President Donald Trump’s cutbacks to the federal workforce, and for journalism in general.
Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated. A Post representative confirmed that one-third of the staff would be cut, without saying how many total employees the newspaper has.
I guess that my good friend Heather Long got out at the Post just in time, because she now works as the Chief Economist for Navy Federal Credit Union! She said that she left in the spring of 2025 because she saw the “writing on the wall,” and had other job offers.
Sadly, this is not something unexpected: the Post had already been making cuts, and trying to meet Mr Bezos’ requirement that the newspaper try to break even. However, it was Mr Bezos’ decision not to allow the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff which cost the newspaper around a quarter million paying subscribers. Since the newspaper had obviously been supporting the then-Vice President in every way other than the spiked endorsement, I fail to see how letting the endorsement be made would have changed the election, but spiking it certainly cost the Post money.
Mr Bezos defended his decision in the pages of the newspaper, saying “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” but if the Post reported on its own layoffs, such was not on the newspaper’s website main page as of 6:05 PM EST on Wednesday. The New York Times reported, at 6:07 PM EST that the layoff notices had gone out.
Perhaps the newspaper should have read its own masthead tagline, because if “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” added as a protest to President Trump during his first term, is keeping the readership in darkness about the newspaper’s layoffs really that great an idea?
It would take someone with Mr Bezos’ money, as Dr Soon-Shiong’s worries have demonstrated, to buy the newspaper from him. I once suggested that he simply give the Post to his ex, Mackenzie Scott, net worth $30.8 billion, because she likes giving away her money, and, for newspaper owners today, giving away their money really is what they have to do.
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