Washington Post Plans Major Job Cuts, Scaling Back Sports and Foreign Reporting

The Washington Post has announced plans to cut roughly one-third of its workforce, a move that will significantly reduce coverage in areas including sports, local reporting and international news.

The layoffs, confirmed on Wednesday, affect employees across multiple departments, with newsroom staff among the hardest hit. The decision marks another period of turmoil for the prominent US newspaper, which has been owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos since 2013.

In a memo to staff, executive editor Matt Murray said the cuts were necessary to restore stability and reposition the organisation for the future. He acknowledged the scale of the decision, describing it as painful but unavoidable.

“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition,” Murray wrote.

He said the publication has struggled with a steep decline in online readership over the past three years, a trend he linked partly to changes in how audiences consume news in the age of artificial intelligence. Murray added that the paper had become overly shaped by older approaches and was no longer reaching a broad enough audience.

The announcement sparked an immediate backlash from staff and former leaders. The Washington Post Guild warned that continued job losses would weaken the newsroom and undermine the paper’s public mission, while laid-off journalists shared their reactions on social media.

Several reporters said entire teams had been eliminated. The paper’s former Cairo bureau chief said all Middle East correspondents and editors had lost their jobs, while a reporter based in Ukraine said she was dismissed while covering the ongoing war. Others reported deep cuts to the metro desk, which covers news in the Washington DC area.

Marty Baron, who served as executive editor until 2021, described the move as one of the darkest moments in the newspaper’s history. He said Bezos had previously been a strong advocate for press freedom, particularly during the first Trump administration, but questioned whether that commitment remained.

“I wish I detected the same spirit today,” Baron said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for The Post said the layoffs were intended to strengthen the organisation and sharpen its editorial focus.

The job cuts are the latest in a series of reductions and buyouts across the company in recent years, as the paper grapples with financial pressures and declining subscriptions. Its challenges intensified after the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of the 2024 US election, a break from decades of tradition that reportedly led to a sharp drop in subscribers.

Further controversy followed Bezos’ directive to refocus the opinion section on personal liberties and free markets, a shift that prompted the section’s editor to resign.

The Post’s struggles stand in contrast to rivals such as The New York Times, which reported adding around 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the final quarter of 2025, highlighting the growing divide in fortunes across the US media industry.