The Washington Post’s suicide-by-1,000-cuts business plan is going swimmingly. Word of the most recent act of self-harm came with a New York Times report on Friday on an internal memo informing the staff that the Jeff Bezos regime had decided “not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” The opening ceremony in Milan is under two weeks away.
News that the Post intended to no-show an event that it had historically flooded with reporters was partially walked back on Monday, with the paper reportedly planning to send a whopping four reporters to Italy. But that concession was quickly drowned out by reports and rumors that a Apocalyptic round of layoffs is coming.
The media blog Status wrote that “as many as 300 Post employees,” or more than a third of the entire staff, were about to be RIF’d. Puck’s Dylan Byers tweeted that he’d heard that “hundreds” of employees were expected to be let go and the “sports desk could be shuttered entirely.” At an afternoon meeting on Monday, according to former Postie Paul Farhi, editors told the foreign staff that "half" the newsroom will be let go.
Erik Wemple, the Times reporter who broke the Olympics story, reported that a group of foreign correspondents sent a “collective plea” to Bezos asking the big guy to preserve the paper’s international coverage from his next round of slashes.
“We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance and later extinction – not the shared success that remains attainable,” read the correspondents’ missive to the boss. The memo writer was paraphrasing Bezos’s introductory speech to the Post employees after buying the iconic newspaper in 2013, when he outlined the importance of growing the staff. Priorities have changed, utterly.
Wemple reported today that the sports desk also decided not to send either of its two Washington Nationals beat reporters or any other staffers to cover spring training next month. So there’s no reason to believe Bezos will let any pleas or any potential impact on his paper’s relevance stall any plan to go all East Wing on the sports and foreign news desks. He bought the iconic paper for $250 million, and under his reign turned it into something with the street value of a used piano, and less utility. But this isn’t about money. Bezos recently spent a reported $75 million to buy and promote a Melania Trump documentary that nobody will watch, on the high heels of shelling out as much as $55 million on his wedding. If he cared about the paper’s survival, the cuts wouldn’t be happening.
Every big action taken in recent years indicates Bezos just wants to kill the Post. He hired William Lewis, late of the Wall Street Journal, as publisher in 2024, and Lewis in turn brought in lots of other Rupert Murdoch mentees to top the masthead. Bezos trumpeted the paper’s new right-wing bent by killing the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, then sitting on stage mere rows behind the president he helped elect during the inauguration.
The paper signaled that local coverage no longer mattered with the June 2025 move to eliminate the standalone Metro section. The Style section still exists, but like the sports desk has been directionless and unimportant for some time, apparently by design.
Amid the suicidal moves, management debuted a new mission statement for the paper, "Riveting Storytelling for All of America," and told staffers the goal was to have a website with "200 million paying users” at a time that the actual paid readership was down to three million and shrinking like an Ozempic user’s Taco Bell tab.
I only know one person, my buddy Tom, who still subscribes to the print edition of the newspaper. He called me yesterday after hearing the end of the sports section was upon us. Bezos had finally lost Tom.
“I think this is it,” Tom told me.
So perhaps killing off the sports section and foreign desk is the humane thing for Bezos to do, so long as this means a merciful end for the entire operation is near. Just get it over with, motherfucker.
Disclosures: I was a paperboy for the Washington Post for six years as a kid, then covered horse racing for the sports section for about three years in the 1990s before getting fired in the most wondrous way possible, and did music reviews for the Style section for about 30 years, and somewhere in my basement I still have the “Nixon Resigns” issue in the very canvas bag I delivered it in.
