The Washington Post is slashing hundreds of jobs

The Washington Post announced mass layoffs affecting hundreds of employees across nearly every department, as owner Jeff Bezos moved to slash a third of its workforce.

Executive Editor Matt Murray framed the layoffs as a survival tactic for the AI era. He cited a dramatic 50% drop in organic search traffic over the last three years and a decline in daily story output.

The cuts have hit the San Francisco bureau and the foreign affairs desk particularly hard.

The Post is also shuttering the sports and books sections and suspending its flagship podcast, Post Reports. The Metro section was slashed from over 40 staffers to roughly a dozen.

Notably, the reporter covering Amazon, the source of Bezos’s vast wealth, was also let go.

Former Post editor Marty Baron called the move one of the “darkest days” in the paper’s history. 

The restructuring comes as traditional media organizations struggle to generate revenue in the age of AI, social media, and declining website traffic.