Opinion Hopelessness, despair and an uncertain future: The message from Washington Post layoffs
Simply put, these cuts — on top of earlier defections by many of the paper’s most talented staff — mean that we will simply know a lot less about the world
Last week’s sweeping staff cuts at the Washington Post eliminated about 300 jobs, representing more than a third of the newsroom. (FILE PHOTO: The newspaper's banner logo is seen during the grand opening of the Washington Post newsroom in Washington January 28, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron) A cloud of hopelessness and despair settled over the world of journalism last week as The Washington Post, a durable news organisation long identified with bravery, stylishness and quality, announced massive personnel layoffs, signalling a shrinking ambition.
Last week’s retreat marked a sharp contrast to the high hopes that accompanied Jeff Bezos’s arrival as owner a dozen years earlier. Martin Baron, the highly regarded editor of the Post, in his 2023 book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, recalled how different things were when Bezos purchased the paper from the exalted Graham family: “The Post, in Bezos’s view, could remake itself into a paper of nationwide, even worldwide reach unlike any other local newspaper company.”
Early on, Baron wrote, Bezos brashly told his editors that the market for his paper might be “the English-speaking world.”
Those ambitions have withered. Last week’s sweeping staff cuts eliminated about 300 jobs, representing more than a third of the newsroom. According to Paul Farhi, a former Post staffer who specialises in covering the press, this was “the single largest one-day layoff of journalists in American history.”
The sports department and books section are being closed. The metro team is being slashed. In the early years of this century, the paper’s metro department had about 200 journalists. The number will shrink to a tenth of that to cover a booming, complicated metropolis.
A similar reduction in international reporting was announced. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Post journalists will no longer cover the Middle East or Sydney or China or New Delhi. Gone too are most of the technology reporters, including the reporter who covers Amazon, the company started by Bezos.
Simply put, these cuts—on top of earlier defections by many of the paper’s most talented staff — mean that we will simply know a lot less about the world.
Below are some of the takeaways and insights about journalism, both in the United States and worldwide, that emerge from the bloodletting at the Post.
Wealthy owners
Until recently, owning a news outlet was almost an automatic way to make a lot of money — and to have a prime seat at the table of the influentials. That is no longer the case. Bezos has lost millions of dollars at the Post and, despite his bottomless pockets, has lost interest in covering his annual losses.
Bezos, who is worth $250 billion, bought The Washington Post in October 2013 for $250 million from the Graham family, which had owned the paper for 80 years.
Print circulation of the Post hovers under 1,00,000, a fraction of what it was when he purchased the paper. (In India, dozens of papers boast that circulation.) This low number notwithstanding, he still wields enormous influence. He incurred deep staff resentment when he refused to endorse Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
Sports Coverage
Until this past week, The Washington Post has boasted one of the nation’s strongest sports sections. In an epitaph to bygone sports coverage, Don Graham, the former owner who once edited the sports section, was widely quoted as saying:
“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s.”
Historically, sports coverage has been a key ingredient to a robust newspaper organisation. Sports teams help forge local pride and identity while appealing to an important fraction of the readership. But this is fast changing. More and more, sports teams and leagues are taking control of their own coverage and telling their own stories. This could be a precursor of how journalism is done. It is akin to the proprietor of the team that wins the Super Bowl writing the story of the team’s victory. It is not inconceivable for large financial institutions to pay for the privilege of covering themselves.
Talent Drain
The layoffs could have an incalculable intangible impact on who becomes journalists.
It is impossible to count how many of today’s senior journalists were drawn into the field by reading about the courage and swagger of The Washington Post and its coverage of Watergate and official Washington in the 1970s.
No journalistic outlet plays that role today. The consequences could be felt for generations.
Democracy and Darkness
One month into Trump’s presidency, in 2017, just as the president began calling the press “the enemy of the people,” Bezos himself came up with a new official slogan for his paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
That powerful slogan now seems hollow and ironic.
Recently, much to the dismay of his staff, Bezos seems to have become more interested in using the newspaper as a political instrument to ingratiate himself with his other vast business interests to President Trump.
And Then There was One
With the Post on life support, only one newspaper that publishes a full menu of news each day remains in the United States.
The New York Times (where I worked as a reporter half a century ago) continues to do impressive reporting and is prospering.
Over the years, it tried many paths to profitability. It published a gossip magazine. It bought a big city newspaper, the Boston Globe. It controlled a mini-empire of small television stations and local newspapers. It owned a paper mill. It produced a Broadway play.
None of that worked.
It has found recent success with its digital offerings, particularly food recipes (both exotic and sensible) and games. In a new era for journalism, financial markets have begun to view the Times as a lifestyle brand — not a newspaper company, but one that competes for customers’ leisure time.
Tom Goldstein, the founding dean of the O.P. Jindal University School of Journalism in Sonipat, was also dean of the graduate journalism schools at Columbia and Berkeley
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