The Washington Post building in downtown D.C.
Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/AP Photo
Some of the Washington Post’s most prized reporters — Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager — have announced their departures from the paper in recent weeks, scoring jobs at the Post’s rivals including The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. Editors are fleeing, too, the most prominent being managing editor Matea Gold, who joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times in December. The exodus has grown so great that Matt Murray, the Post’s interim executive editor, put a stop to newsroomwide good-bye emails because he believed it was bad for morale — before reversing course amid an outcry.
The flight from the Post is part of the ongoing fallout from owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to pull the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall, which led to 250,000 subscription cancellations from readers who bought into the Post’s resistance-era identity as a bastion of democracy. But it’s not just that staff members have lost faith in the Post’s journalistic mission. They are also deeply concerned about the paper’s business strategy, which, combined with the existential questions surrounding its coverage of Donald Trump, has made the Post a fertile poaching ground for its competitors.
In addition to seeing some of its most respected writers and editors scooped up, this week the Post let go of 4 percent of its workforce on the business side. While shake-ups at news organizations are common, and sometimes necessary, there is a sense that the Post is in danger of falling into a cycle from which it may not be able to recover.
It was almost a year ago when CEO Will Lewis debuted his “Fix it, build it, scale it” strategy, and the Post’s current business model seems just as formless as it did then. Last year, even before the endorsement debacle, the paper was on track to lose at least as much money as it’d lost the year prior: $77 million. “It’s one thing to be in a newsroom that’s breaking even or losing a little bit. I don’t want to be in a newsroom that’s depending on Jeff Bezos because he’s one of the only people who can afford $100 million a year,” said one Post staffer. “We need to fix that. Is Will Lewis the person to fix that? I’m waiting to see the evidence.”
Murray doesn’t seem to think things will get better any time soon, intimating in private conversations with staff that a dark period was ahead for the Post. When layoffs hit the business side this week, it produced a bizarre spectacle of the paper’s public-relations division announcing that it was no longer doing “publicity for our journalism across broadcast and traditional media outlets” and instead focusing its efforts on a “star-talent unit” just as its stars are walking out the door. There are fears of major cuts coming to the newsroom, all while the C-suite seems to occupy a different universe. Lewis’s leadership team has floated a goal of attracting 200 million subscribers in meetings with senior Post editors, according to a person present, who noted that the number struck many who heard it as wildly unrealistic. (The Times, for comparison, has 11 million, with a goal of reaching 15 million by the end of 2027.)
“There was never a coherent strategy at the top that connected to news and subscriptions,” one longtime employee said. “It’s this ultimate gaslighting to say, ‘You all didn’t change and that’s why we’re failing,’ when the institution has really been failed by its business leaders.”
The Post’s twin crises — the loss of confidence in both the journalism and the business — are of course intertwined. In a world where the Times has mastered the all-you-can-eat-buffet subscription bundle, the Journal dominates finance, and various D.C.-based newsletters are churning out political scoops, the Post is in search of a coherent identity. From just a branding perspective, one option would be to lean in to its reputation for independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, a storied legacy that goes back to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and includes the mountain of Pulitzers amassed under Marty Baron. But in internal conversations, executives have touted experiments with AI and aggregation as a way to reach new readers, while saying little about the Post’s historic strengths, according to a person familiar with these talks.
Anxieties about the Post’s priorities deepened last week when Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after her bosses spiked a cartoon depicting Bezos, alongside other billionaires, bending the knee to a statue of Trump. More recently, it was revealed that Murray had instituted a new dictum that the Post will no longer cover stories about itself, prompting the paper’s media critic Erik Wemple to respond, “I couldn’t possibly dissent more strongly from that policy.”
Part of the problem is Murray’s uncertain status. He is still technically an interim editor, despite reports claiming that he has been tapped for the top position. Lewis apparently wants Murray for the job, but there’s been no official announcement, which makes staffers wonder if he lacks the confidence of Bezos. “It’s the punch line of the newsroom that he’s the ‘permanent temporary guy.’ In order to stay and make a pitch to recruit people, you have to be able to articulate your vision,” one Post veteran said. “Matt might not be the most charismatic person or leader, but he could make a compelling case. But this is true until, what, February, when Will and Jeff potentially replace him? It just holds no credence, because it’s a temporary vision.”
Lewis, meanwhile, is now best known for his hostility toward the newsroom. At first his posture seemed like tough love, which is something journalists can sometimes use. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis told the newsroom last June. But subsequent reports about his questionable past business ventures and shady conduct at British newspapers, along with Lewis’s churlish response to the journalists producing these stories, have soured people on him. I’m told that people who have had conversations with Lewis recently have come away unsettled by his deep frustration, bordering on contempt, with his reporters.
All of which leaves the Post deeply vulnerable to a doom loop in which talented journalists leave and no one wants to replace them. “On one hand, it’s the Washington Post. There’s not that many good options for places to work, so they will always be able to hire,” the veteran Post journalist said. “But the flip side is that they aren’t going to be able to — in this moment, until they turn things around — get top talent. Because top talent always has a choice between the Post and the Times, the Post and the Journal, the Post and The Atlantic. And why would you ever choose the Post right now?”
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