The Washington Post

Overview

The newspaper that forced a president to resign is being deliberately shrunk by its billionaire owner. In February 2026, The Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists — over a third of its newsroom — eliminating its sports department and books section, shuttering its Middle East, India and Australia bureaus, and suspending its daily news podcast, Post Reports (Britannica; IFJ). The newsroom that once numbered more than 1,000 journalists is now smaller than the one Jeff Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013 — and days after the layoffs, publisher Will Lewis resigned after a turbulent two-year tenure (Britannica).

The decline was years in the making. By the end of 2023 the paper had lost half its audience and half a million subscribers (IFJ). Then came the two controversies that broke the bond with its readers. In October 2024, in the closing days of the presidential election, the paper’s editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris — and Bezos killed it, declaring in an op-ed that endorsements only add to public mistrust of the news media (Britannica). Readers reacted with outrage: within days some 300,000 subscriptions — about 12 percent — had been canceled, according to NPR’s reporting (Britannica).

The opinion-page purge

In February 2025 Bezos went further, announcing on X that the Post’s opinion pages would be limited to defending two pillars — individual liberties and free markets — and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” effectively ending the broad-based opinion section (IFJ; Britannica). The fallout was immediate: opinion editor David Shipley resigned, followed by veteran columnists Ruth Marcus and Eugene Robinson, while some of the paper’s most high-profile news reporters defected to competing publications (Britannica). Earlier, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned when the opinions page refused to publish her cartoon showing Bezos and other tech billionaires genuflecting to a statue of Trump — months before she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Post work (Britannica).

The condemned reacted in apocalyptic terms. The Post Guild said the workforce had shrunk by roughly 400 people over three years and that “continuing to eliminate workers only stands to weaken the newspaper, drive away readers and undercut The Post’s mission” (IFJ). IFJ Secretary General Anthony Bellanger called it “catastrophic”: “We are witnessing the dismantling of what used to be one of the most respected newspapers in the United States” (IFJ).

From bankruptcy to Watergate

The 2026 cuts are a mirror image of the paper’s 20th-century ascent. The Post was founded in 1877 as a four-page publication serving the Democratic Party, and for more than half a century it limped through economic problems and ownership changes until it landed in bankruptcy (Britannica). In 1933 the financier Eugene Meyer bought it out of receivership and rebuilt it around an independent editorial stance and thorough reporting (Britannica). Meyer turned it over to his son-in-law Philip Graham in 1946; Graham bought the rival Washington Times-Herald in 1954 and Newsweek magazine in 1961, then took his own life in 1963 (Britannica). His widow, Katharine Graham, succeeded him — becoming, in 1973, the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company — and brought Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief Ben Bradlee back to the Post (Britannica).

Under Graham and Bradlee, the paper made history twice in three years. On June 18, 1971, the Post began publishing excerpts of the top-secret Defense Department report known as the Pentagon Papers — after The New York Times had published them first — and both papers resumed publication after the Supreme Court’s landmark prior-restraint ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States on June 30, 1971 (Britannica). Then, beginning in 1972, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported presidential complicity in the Watergate scandal; Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, and the Post won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (Britannica). The paper has now won 80 Pulitzers as of 2026 (Britannica).

The record is not unblemished. In 1981 the Post suffered what Britannica calls its greatest reporting embarrassment: Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer-winning story about an eight-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy’s World,” proved to be fabricated, and the paper returned the prize two days after winning it (Britannica). And the Post shared one of its strangest scoops with its great rival: in 1995 the Post and The New York Times jointly published the 35,000-word Unabomber manifesto in an eight-page special section on September 19, a decision that led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (Britannica).

The Bezos bargain

The paper that Graham built is the one Bezos bought. When Bezos paid $250 million in 2013, he added staff and pushed digital subscriptions; by 2025 the Post had about 2.5 million digital subscribers — but that placed it behind The New York Times, Substack and The Wall Street Journal in paying digital readers, per Press Gazette data (Britannica).

One Post alumnus went on to build a different kind of news company: Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei spent three years as a congressional reporter at the Post before co-founding Politico in 2006 and launching Axios in 2017 (Virginia Business). And the digital pivot that was supposed to secure the paper’s future instead produced a subscription gap with its oldest rival: at the end of 2025, The New York Times counted 12.78 million total subscribers — more than five times the Post’s 2.5 million digital subscriptions — and the newsroom Bezos once expanded is now smaller than the one he inherited (Britannica).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a single definitive layoff figure: Britannica reports more than 300 of 800 newsroom employees let go, while the IFJ reports more than 300 employees — about one third of the entire staff — and the profile states both as cited. The 300,000 canceled subscriptions are per NPR reporting cited by Britannica, not the Post’s own disclosure. The Pulitzer total of 80 is dated to 2026. The profile does not assert that Bezos ordered the 2026 layoffs personally — management announced them, and Lewis resigned days later; criticism of Bezos’s role is reported as the stated position of the Guild, NewsGuild-CWA and IFJ, not as an established fact. The claim that the newsroom is smaller than when Bezos bought it is Britannica’s reporting, not this profile’s independent measurement. And nothing here predicts whether the downsized Post can stabilize — Matt Murray’s pledge to become “more essential” and the Guild’s warnings are both reported as positions, not outcomes.