Washington Post’s White House team tries to halt massive layoffs by appealing directly to Jeff Bezos
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With sweeping layoffs expected to hit The Washington Post next month, the paper’s White House reporters joined the “collective plea” from the newsroom to publicly urge mega-wealthy owner Jeff Bezos to halt the massive rumored cuts.
The note to Bezos, which was first reported by Semafor on Thursday, comes as rumors have swirled that the Will Lewis-led newspaper is looking to gut the Post’s sports, arts, metro and foreign news departments. According to multiple reports, the newsroom could see over 100 employees laid off, and the company as a whole may cut as many as 300 staffers.
With the looming layoffs spooking the newsroom, especially among reporters working at the desks that are likely to be impacted the most, journalists at the paper began tweeting under the hashtag #SaveThePost in an effort to grab the attention of the Amazon founder who purchased the outlet more than a decade ago.
Amid the social media campaign targeting Bezos and his socialite wife Lauren Sanchez, dozens of the Post’s foreign correspondents sent a “collective plea” letter to the billionaire begging him to reverse course. “We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance and later extinction — not the shared success that remains attainable,” the staff wrote.
In their letter to Bezos on Thursday, the White House team – which is not expected to be affected by the cuts – spotlighted the collaboration they have had with the sections that could see brutal layoffs.
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Washington Post reporters are now publicly pleading with billionaire owner Jeff Bezos to reconsider the expected massive layoffs that will gut much of the paper. (Getty Images for America Busines)
“Given the uncertainty facing the Post, we wanted to tell you directly how the White House team relies on other desks and explain how our colleagues’ work helps lift up our own,” the DC reporters wrote.
“We are clear eyed about the financial challenges facing the paper. When we accepted our assignments to cover the White House last year, we took the job with a goal to win back former subscribers and draw in new readers,” the letter continued. “A diversified Washington Post helps us do it.”
In an internal Slack chat that was viewed by CNN, White House bureau chief Matt Viser wrote: “If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are.”
The reporters at the paper are notably circumventing Lewis, the Post’s embattled publisher and CEO, and appealing to Bezos directly at this point.
This is all happening after the Washington Post has suffered through years of declining revenues, which was exacerbated after Bezos decided to block the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and push the publication’s opinion section into a conservative-leaning direction.
Those moves by the Blue Origin founder were seen as an attempt to curry favor with Donald Trump amid the president’s return to the White House, leading to the cancellations of hundreds of thousands of paid subscriptions.
Additionally, with Bezos seeming indifferent to the newsroom’s concerns – he snubbed an invitation to speak with the staff when he was in town for Trump’s inauguration – the Post has witnessed an exodus of editorial talent in the past year.
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‘There’s now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post ,’ a veteran correspondent told CNN. (Getty Images)
All the while, as the recent Bezos-led changes and turmoil have cost the paper, Lewis is aiming to try to push the Post into profitability this year by taking a lean approach and cutting more and more costs.
This has prompted former and current Post journalists to wonder if the paper “is slashing its way to irrelevance” amid an “existential meltdown,” with staffers completely losing faith in both Bezos and Lewis.
“There’s now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post,” one veteran correspondent told CNN, adding that the pair “drove us into a ditch with their decisions, particularly the reinvention of the Opinion section, costing us hundreds of thousands of subscribers.”
Another former desk told New York magazine that “when people were deciding which subscriptions they could live without, the Post was an easy cut.” On top of that, according to the source, Bezos “made it a lot easier with his decisions” and now the paper’s “left with something that’s basically on life support” because of the lack of vision.
