Week of Feb. 5, 2026

From the publisher’s desk

One of the nation’s great newspapers was hacked to bits yesterday.

If you haven’t yet heard what happened at The Washington Post, here’s how NPR covered it:

The Washington Post moved Wednesday at the behest of owner Jeff Bezos to cut a third of its entire workforce. The layoffs affect every corner of the newsroom.

In a newsroom Zoom call, Executive Editor Matt Murray called the move “a strategic reset” it needs to compete in the era of artificial intelligence. The paper had not evolved with the times, he said, and the changes were overdue in light of “difficult and even disappointing realities.”

With the job cuts, the storied newspaper narrows the scope of its ambitions for the foreseeable future. It is a remarkable reversal for a vital pillar of American journalism that had looked to Bezos — one of the wealthiest people on Earth—as a champion and a financial savior.

Murray said the Post will shutter its sports desk, while keeping some sports reporters who will write feature stories. It will likewise close its Books section and suspend the signature podcast Post Reports.

The international desk will shrink dramatically. Among those laid off: the paper’s Ukraine bureau chief and correspondent, the latter of whom was in a war zone. (The local staffers are still employed as of now.)

The paper’s entire Middle East desk was let go, according to their social media posts. So too was Caroline O’Donovan, the reporter who covers Amazon—the primary source of Bezos’ wealth.

People who have not been paying attention to the goings-on at the Post may be inclined to think this is just the latest in a series of cuts at newspapers—another symptom of the fact that the revenue model for news publications is very, very broken.

No, that’s not the case. This one is different—because a massive leadership failure is, at least in part, to blame.

Here’s a snippet of The New York Times‘ coverage of the layoffs at the Post:

Mr. Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions. Mr. Lewis has experimented with several changes to transform the organization, notably embracing artificial intelligence to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.

Much of his tenure has been tumultuous, including a shake-up of newsroom leadership and scrutiny of his ties to a phone-hacking scandal while he worked for News Corp. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Lewis announced a new policy from Mr. Bezos ending presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, which blocked a drafted endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.

The financial picture at the Post would no doubt be better had Bezos not chased away hundreds of thousands of subscribers in an attempt to curry favor with Trump—and while those subscription cancellations were justified, they were ill-advised, because they hurt the newsroom far more than they hurt Jeff Bezos (a topic I covered in the RN&R back in November 2024).

But the leadership rot at the Post goes well beyond Bezos’ Trump suck-up attempt.

In a piece for The Ringer, Matt Murray looked specifically at the attempts editors and reporters in the Post’s sports department made to, well, evolve with the times:

Post sportswriters spent two years waiting for the paper’s top editors to weigh in on the big, structural issues the section was grappling with. Do we cover … everything? Do we write that gamer from the Super Bowl? Could we morph into our own version of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section?

They never heard management weigh in. A Post sportswriter said: “It’s like a football team where they say, after they’ve lost 10 games, ‘We got to find our identity.’ For two years, we just didn’t have an identity—and had no idea if we were ever going to find one.”

If the problem was that nobody was reading the Post’s stories about the Commanders, one idea would have been to feed the masses Commanders news in podcast form. The Post sports section didn’t have a podcast.

Ava Wallace hosted a daily podcast during the 2024 Paris Olympics that ended after the Games. Long-form podcasts were pitched but never made. Proposals for a (longtime sports columnist) Sally Jenkins podcast went through three different iterations.

“We all ran a million proposals up the flagpole, all kinds of experiments,” said Jenkins. “Never got any green lights. Never got any support. Never really got any feedback.”

Numerous former Washington Post staffers have come forward to condemn the layoffs. In a fiery statement, former Post editor Marty Baron pointed to the damage wrought by Bezos killing the Kamala Harris endorsement: “Bezos’ sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

Former Post reporter/columnist Gene Weingarten, who became the only person to ever win two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing during his time at the paper, wrote:

There were two proximate causes, in the end:

The first was jaw-dropping incompetence — both professional and financial — by a management team led by British CEO Will Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch protege whose main accomplishment, to date, had been getting implicated in covering up the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London.

The second reason was the greed of a new owner of incomprehensible wealth who viewed the newspaper not as a national trust—he simply had no background in or love for journalism, no understanding of how it is literally vital to democracy—but as a business challenge, as with any other business. In this case, in the end, when his business model failed, it was a business to be milked and repurposed to fit whatever his transitory needs were, using it to increase his wealth and influence by sucking up to a malevolent power his newspaper was morally obliged to challenge. He betrayed his newspaper, and his country. And you.

The Washington Post, despite the endorsement idiocy, was still doing amazing journalism. Despite the massive cuts made yesterday, the Post will continue to do great work, but far, far less of it—and our country will be worse off because of that.

—Jimmy Boegle, publisher/executive editor