When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, the staff hailed him for rescuing it from mounting financial struggles. For years, the storied newspaper flourished as he invested in its journalism and business innovations.
More recently, the paper has lost tens of millions of dollars annually. And now Post reporters — by the scores — are writing letters and social media posts, appealing to Bezos not to eliminate their jobs.
"I'm very disappointed and find it contrary to what [Bezos] said at the time," former Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. tells NPR. "There's been no announcement about this, no rationale about this. No vision for what the paper ought to be. I'm disturbed and surprised by that."
While the Post has not made any public announcement, the letters speak to the bleak belief that layoffs are imminent.
"We are The Washington Post's international correspondents, writing with a collective plea for you to preserve our newspaper's global coverage, which we fear will be greatly weakened in coming cuts," one such appeal read. "Our coverage — thanks to your investment — shapes conversation and global policy at the highest levels each day."
At full force, the current newsroom stands at just shy of 800 journalists. Union members say they have been warned the newsroom could lose anywhere from 100 to 300 people, though that higher figure could also include employees who work outside the newsroom.
Warned about assignments, encouraged to job hunt
This story is based on interviews with 10 current and former Post staffers drawn from both the newsroom and the business side of the paper. The Post declined detailed requests to comment.
The silence about the paper's future from Bezos and Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis has further damaged trust, Post editors, reporters and business-side staffers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of putting their jobs in jeopardy.
The fact the letters are directed to Bezos reflects the journalists' lack of faith in Lewis, according to six Post staffers.
They note that Bezos has not weighed in publicly to support Post reporter Hannah Natanson after her computers and other devices were seized by FBI agents over an investigation of a leak of national security documents. Even so, Lewis and Executive Editor Matt Murray have strongly supported her and the paper's attorneys are fighting in court to get the the Justice Department to return her materials.
Editors are still asking reporters to break news and meet their deadlines, as they have done throughout the paper's 148-year history, which includes leading roles in covering the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal, the Clinton impeachment, and the Trump years.
Yet they are also now offering some unusual guidance.
On the international desk, some editors have told correspondents not to accept some assignments that would take them to dangerous spots abroad after Sunday, according to three Post journalists with direct knowledge of events. The fear is that the reporters might be laid off while in personal peril.
Additionally, some editors on the foreign, metro and sports desks have quietly suggested to the journalists who work for them that they should seriously consider any outside job offers they receive.
Sports reporters were recently told to cancel plans to go to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics next week, even though the paper had put down a significant deposit to reserve work facilities and hotel rooms. Executive Editor Matt Murray relented and is sending a scaled-back team of four journalists, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Calls for Bezos to sell the Post
The paper went through buyouts in the newsroom in fall 2023 as part of company-wide job reductions. The business side experienced layoffs a year ago.
The Post Guild, which represents hundreds of newsroom employees, wrote in a public statement that it vehemently opposes any additional cuts.
A new round of cutbacks "only stands to weaken the newspaper, drive away readers and undercut the Post's mission: to hold power to account without fear or favor and provide critical insight into communities across the region, country, and world," the Guild wrote. "If Jeff Bezos no longer supports that mission, then the Post and its readers deserve a steward who does."
In the years right after acquiring the paper, Bezos — the billionaire founder of Amazon — had embraced the Post's reportorial zeal. In 2017 the paper adopted the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" motto suggested by the paper's legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
He backed then-Executive Editor Marty Baron as a partner during the Post's aggressive coverage of President Trump's first term, despite increasing pressure from the administration and Trump himself.
In a lawsuit, Amazon alleged the Trump administration found a way to hit Bezos on the bottom line: the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract for which Amazon had been widely perceived as the leading bidder. The decision followed Trump's public criticism of Bezos. Court rulings led the Pentagon to settle Amazon's suit by splitting up the contract among four companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.
To this day, Bezos has never interfered in newsroom decisions, according to interviews with two dozen senior Post journalists over the years. But he has been silent on its future and fate for an extended period.
Bezos has a lot to keep him occupied. Besides his stake in Amazon, he owns several companies — including Blue Origin and the AI startup Project Prometheus — and he remarried last summer in a lavish, multi-day affair in Venice. Post journalists have questioned Bezos' commitment to the paper, particularly after he concluded Trump was likely to return to office well before the 2024 elections.
Subscriptions are up, but the paper is losing tens of millions
In late 2023, Bezos named Lewis, who had edited the Telegraph in Britain and led Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal as chief executive, to lead the paper as CEO.
Lewis appealed not just because of his successful push for digital experimentation at the Journal, the British Telegraph and his own start-up, but because he had been a senior aide to two idiosyncratic conservatives: Murdoch and Boris Johnson when Johnson was prime minister. As NPR has previously reported, Bezos believed Lewis would be able to help the paper navigate Trump's return to office.
Lewis last held a town hall with staffers in June 2024, when he told them the paper had lost $100 million in 2022 and $77 million in 2023. Several people with knowledge of the company's finances say the losses spiked again last year. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been authorized to speak about internal corporate matters.
Lewis has not met with the newsroom since that 2024 town hall, which coincided with intense scrutiny from NPR, the New York Times and the Post about questionable episodes in his journalistic past in the U.K. and his efforts to block coverage of it.
With much fanfare, Lewis has introduced several initiatives involving artificial intelligence. He has launched WP Ventures, promoting non-traditional journalism, and a free service compiling opinion pieces from other outlets to draw in new readers. Last year, the paper sold 675,000 subscriptions, its highest sales volume in five years, as first reported by the media newsletter Status.
So far, these measures have not adequately stemmed the red ink.
A warm relationship with Trump
In late October 2024, Bezos killed a planned editorial endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. He argued that making presidential endorsements eroded trust with the broader public and said he was not doing so to advance his investments.
"While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight," Bezos wrote at the time. "The stakes are too high... To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world."
Bezos later announced a new libertarian emphasis for the editorial page, which had been a center-left voice opposing many of Trump's assaults on democratic institutions. Bezos instead urged a focus on "personal liberties and free markets."
More than 375,000 digital subscribers canceled over the twin changes, as NPR reported. The editorial page editor resigned and numerous columnists and reporters departed for other publications. Despite those defections, the Post has not let up on its vigorous coverage, including on the Ukraine-Russia war, the U.S. seizure of Venezuela's president, and the Trump administration.
Bezos has, meanwhile, struck up a working and warm relationship with the president.
He and his wife have dined with the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago; Amazon contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration last January and Bezos sat on the dais during the ceremony. The Amazon Prime streaming service paid $40 million to license a documentary about first lady Melania Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported she is to receive the lion's share of that fee.
And under the leadership of its new editor, Adam O'Neal, Bezos's editorial page has failed several times to cite his direct financial interests in the matters it opines about.
Upon acquiring the Post, Bezos told its then-media reporter Paul Farhi that the paper was an important institution worth preserving for the nation.
"I don't want to imply that I have a worked-out plan," Bezos said. "This will be uncharted terrain, and it will require experimentation."
"There would be change with or without new ownership," he said in the August 2013 interview. "But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners."
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