The Washington Post to Cut Most Local, Sports, International Coverage
Photo courtesy NPR
By Patrick D. Lewis
In a video announcement distributed to The Washington Post staff members early Wednesday, owner Jeff Bezos said the publication would be going through a “strategic reset.”
That shift includes greatly reducing or entirely eliminating the newspaper’s Sports Department, Metro/Local Department, foreign affairs section, and staff photographers, according to sources who spoke to CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets after the meeting.
Rumors of the layoffs had been widely circulating for days after editors reportedly told their reporters to start looking for other jobs in anticipation of the cuts. Many local section reporters began heavily promoting each other’s stories about Washington with the hashtag #SaveThePost, and the Washington Post Guild, which represents reporters, condemned any such layoffs. Reporters with newspapers in Baltimore, other DC outlets, and elsewhere also supported the Post’s local section staff in the days leading up to the announcement.
Financial problems resulting from plummeting readership over the course of Jeff Bezos’s leadership of the paper were cited as the drivers for the decision to reduce staffing, said Bezos’s publisher and editors. The Post has lost readers at a rate far greater than that of The Wall Street Journal and other large newspapers, which many analysts have attributed to Bezos’s decision to separate the opinion section from the newsroom and implement a shift to the political right in the paper’s editorials, something widely viewed as an attempt to placate President Donald Trump, who has had some business dealings with Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
The Post’s sports department had already been facing a planned reduction in coverage of baseball, with the newspaper’s two Washington Nationals beat reporters having been told they would not be traveling with the team during Spring training this year due to a lack of funding and the Post having decided not to send a team to cover the Olympics. That team is often up to 20 people in size. After blowback, the Post committed to sending three or four reporters to the games.
A number of groups of reporters and mid-level editorial staff had sent open letters to Bezos in the past week asking him not to eliminate the local section in particular, which several outlets now report will be reduced in size from over 40 reporters to a dozen or fewer. The local section not only covers Washington but also the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, totalling over six million people. Just this week, reporters broke several important stories, including coverage of area agencies’ responses to Winter Storm Fern, corruption in city violence intervention programs, and local political news.
