Business & Economics
Washington Post Axes One-Third of Newsroom, Publisher Resigns Days Later
Between Feb 5-8 2026, the Post cut about 300 jobs (≈30 % of staff) and, amid the backlash, publisher Will Lewis quit, leaving a 147-year-old paper suddenly leader-less and hollowed out.
Focusing Facts
- Feb 5-6 2026: 300 journalists—including the entire sports desk and all Middle East correspondents—were laid off in a single Zoom call, shrinking newsroom headcount to under 600.
- Feb 8 2026: Will Lewis stepped down as publisher/CEO; Tumblr veteran Jeff D’Onofrio was named acting publisher the same day.
- A Washington Post Guild GoFundMe topped $330,000 from 2,800 donors within 48 hours to assist the laid-off staff.
Context
Big-bang newsroom culls are not new—think Tribune Co.’s 2008 bankruptcy layoffs or the Denver Post’s Alden-driven cuts in 2018—but rarely has it followed Watergate-level prestige: the Post last shed staff this fast only during the 1933 Depression. The episode underscores two systemic shifts: (1) billionaire-centric ownership where the paper becomes a side-hustle subject to the owner’s political calculus, echoing the Bancroft family’s 2007 sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch, and (2) the digital attention economy’s brutality—Google and Meta siphon ad revenue while subscription churn punishes any editorial wobble, here a 250,000-subscriber drop after a waffling 2024 endorsement policy. On a 100-year horizon, gutting foreign and local beats erodes the informational plumbing that nourishes democracy; once hollowed out, rebuilding institutional memory is almost impossible. Whether nonprofit conversion à la the 1936 Scott Trust (Guardian) or the 2022 Baltimore Banner model emerges, this moment may mark either the Post’s terminal decline or the catalyst for a new ownership paradigm in U.S. journalism.
Perspectives
Progressive and labor-aligned independent media
Democracy Now!, Truthout, The American Prospect — Layoffs at the Post are a billionaire-driven assault on press freedom and democracy, carried out so Jeff Bezos can curry favor with Donald Trump at the expense of workers and global coverage. Their anti-corporate framing may overstate Bezos’s political scheming and underplay the Post’s documented financial losses, reflecting an ideological commitment to labor and left causes.
Media-industry watchdog and trade publications
Columbia Journalism Review, The Verge — The cuts expose catastrophic managerial missteps and a muddled strategy—Bezos and publisher Will Lewis have gutted key beats while chasing gimmicks like AI incubators, dooming the Post’s business model. As insider observers they focus on newsroom strategy metrics and may gloss over broader societal stakes or the difficulty of sustaining legacy newspapers’ revenues, centering the story on professional intrigue.
Right-leaning / tabloid outlets and aggregators
New York Post, Newser — Coverage spotlights the shock of mass layoffs and the guild’s GoFundMe, emphasizing donor tallies, viral images and management absenteeism as a headline-grabbing newsroom drama. Sensational, personality-driven tone amplifies conflict for clicks, offering little analysis of structural media economics and largely sidestepping the ideological battle over the Post’s future.