February 4, 2026

DOWNFALL: Washington Post Lays Off 300 Staffers, Shuttering Sports Section and Gutting Foreign Desk as Once-Mighty Publisher Bleeds Subscribers and Money.

The embattled Washington Post is laying off more than 300 employees—about a third of its already shrunken staff—as it guts sports, local news, and international coverage to cut costs and, its executives hope, boost readership.

Executive Editor Matt Murray told staff on a Wednesday morning call that the layoffs are part of a “broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” as the paper attempts to reposition itself in what he described as an increasingly “crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported. Murray admitted that the Post had lost too much money and had failed to make itself essential to readers.

The layoffs are the latest blow to the Post, which is enduring a bad hangover after going all in on an anti-Trump editorial strategy during President Donald Trump’s first term, using the marketing slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Paid subscriptions surged, and the publisher almost doubled the size of its newsroom to a peak of about 1,000 people in early 2021. But when President Joe Biden took power, interest in the “resistance” flagged, subscription revenue plummeted, and the Post has been losing money and cutting staff. Reader interest has also plummeted from a high of 110 million unique monthly users in January 2021 to 62 million in January 2026. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which the Post has long aspired to be considered an equal to, has pulled far ahead. Back in Washington, Politico has dethroned the Post as the leader in political news coverage.

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In the last few weeks, as layoffs loomed, Post staffers expressed concern about the paper’s direction. “I’ve never experienced such a feeling of dread,” one employee told Status’s Oliver Darcy. A former manager called Bezos’s leadership “a business failure on a colossal level.” Staffers even considered enlisting celebrities like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks to get Bezos to reverse course.

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Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll