When the Washington Post decided to gut its entire sports section as part of mass layoffs aimed at becoming more profitable, the number of readers who unsubscribed may have unpended that equation.
On Saturday, The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin, Erik Wemple, and Katie Robertson offered up a look inside how owner Jeff Bezos upended the storied newspaper in recent months. It tells the story of a billionaire owner who wanted the company “to break even, not to rely on his largess,” and began putting plans in place to figure out the best ways to cut costs, much as he’d done at Amazon, using data-driven metrics, all while distancing himself from any responsibility for the issues that have plagued the paper under his watch.
The Times report details how former CEO Will Lewis presented Bezos with a plan to restore The Post to profitability that called for laying off around 200 employees, in addition to the buyouts that had led to the departure of notable reporters such as Sally Jenkins, Dan Steinberg, and Steven Goff. Bezos objected to the plan, saying it was “not sufficiently grounded in data.” Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray went back to the drawing board and created a plan based on “customer data to assess which sections generated the most readership and compared that against the cost to produce that coverage.”
That’s what led to the eventual layoffs that shuttered the newspapers’ storied sports, arts, and books sections, gutted the metro section, and removed most international correspondents and editors.
According to the Times, 60,000 readers canceled their digital subscriptions in the days following that move, noting that The Post disputed that figure but declined to provide an alternate number.
That’s not quite as high as the reported 250,000 people who canceled their subscriptions after the Washington Post changed its long-standing policy and declined to make a presidential endorsement in 2024, but it certainly created a much deeper hole to dig out of in its search for profitability. That’s especially true when you remember that the paper isn’t replacing what’s been lost with anything of value (despite its best efforts), giving those who have unsubscribed no reason to consider returning.
The Times report also noted that Lewis’s appearance on the Super Bowl LX red carpet the day after the mass layoffs was indeed the straw that broke the camel’s back, leading to his “resignation.”
