The Washington Post is cutting one-third of its staff, slashing hundreds of jobs across the newsroom and other departments in an effort to trim costs and reshape coverage.
The layoffs will affect journalists in nearly all news departments, including the sports, foreign, technology and breaking-news teams, as well as business and technology staff.
“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition,” Executive Editor Matt Murray wrote in a note to newsroom staff Wednesday.
The Post and many other publications have struggled to find a sustainable business model as readers’ news-consumption habits change and web traffic wanes. Murray said the restructuring is intended to make the Post more flexible and provide audiences with more relevant content.
In an interview, Murray declined to say how many of the cuts were coming from the newsroom.
The Post is closing its sports department in its current form but will retain some roles in that coverage area. It is shrinking its international coverage, and will focus on national news and features, investigations and advice on health and wellness topics.
Murray said the Post will continue to have correspondents in about a dozen international locations, and will focus on issues related to national security. “That’s what our readers seem to respond to the most,” he said.
The Post also will restructure its metro section, close its Books section and suspend its Post Reports podcast.
Murray said in his note to staff that the Post’s video department hasn’t kept up with changes in how consumers get their information, and noted the publication’s daily story count has fallen in recent years. “And even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
“You have to be where users are,” he said in an interview later with The Wall Street Journal. “We have to do great journalism that people engage with.”
That includes an effort to “talk to a lot of different kinds of people and reflect the full diversity of life,” he said.
The Post lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024 , The Wall Street Journal previously reported, as it contended with traffic declines from sources including Google and Facebook.
The company said Wednesday that organic search traffic has fallen by nearly half in the past three years.
Publisher William Lewis aims to have the Post break even by the end of 2026, according to the Post spokesperson.
In recent weeks, Post journalists—including foreign correspondents, local-news reporters and members of the White House team—made public pleas asking the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos , to maintain their jobs.
“Cutting this deeply sourced, battle-hardened and tireless staff would hinder The Post’s ability to respond to the biggest news developments on the horizon,” said one late-January letter signed by about 60 foreign correspondents and contractors. “Now more than ever, covering America means covering the world.”
“If other parts of the room are diminished, we all are,” White House bureau chief Matt Viser wrote in a separate message.
Bezos tapped Lewis, former chief executive of Journal publisher Dow Jones, in late 2023 to spearhead a turnaround. Murray, a former Journal editor in chief, joined in 2024.
The Post has conducted multiple rounds of buyouts and layoffs in recent years, eliminating hundreds of jobs across departments.
The paper faced immense backlash in fall 2024 after Bezos pulled a prewritten endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris just before the presidential election. Within days, the Post lost more than 250,000 subscriptions.
In another test, Bezos said last year he wanted to narrow the Post’s opinion section to focus on the support and defense of “personal liberties and free markets,” rather than offering a place to air a range of viewpoints. The move prompted the resignation of David Shipley , then the editor of the opinion section.
Many other senior staff and reporters have left for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Journal and other outlets as the paper struggled with morale and subscriber losses.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com
