The Washington Post downsizes: redundancies, cuts and the end of an era

Finally the blow came. Dry, without mincing words. The Washington Post, the secular cathedral of American journalism that made history with Watergate, has left with the dismissal of a third of its staff. A cross-sectional mowing down: foreign, sports, editing, podcasts. All in, none excluded. Executive editor Matt Murray spoke to the staff, and then in a note to the editorial staff, of 'difficult but decisive actions', of a reset necessary to survive.

In the background there is an unpleasant evidence, and not only for those directly involved. The Post is no longer the Post. Or rather: it can no longer afford to be. 'Frankly, for too long we operated with a structure too rooted in the days when we were a near-monopoly local newspaper,' Murray said. Translation: that world no longer exists. The Internet has crumbled the economic model, Google and Facebook have sucked up advertising and traffic, digital subscriptions are not enough. The bill is steep: $77 million lost in 2023, $100 million in 2024.

It is the symbols that pay. The book section closes, the sports editorial office is dismantled 'in its current form', the foreign presence is reduced, the Post Reports podcast is discontinued. A contraction that is also cultural: less world, more America; less reporting, more service.

At the bottom, like a stone guest, is Jeff Bezos. When he bought the Post in 2013, for $250 million, he promised that he would preserve the journalistic tradition and not intervene in day-to-day management. "There will, of course, be change," he said then. Thirteen years later, that change has the face of layoffs and controversy. The internal union was blunt: "If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this newspaper for generations, then the Post deserves another custodian."

The cut comes after months of tensions, culminating in the decision not to support any candidate in the 2024 presidential election and the more conservative turn of the opinion section, focused on 'personal freedoms and the free market'. Decisions that caused a haemorrhaging of over 200,000 subscribers (or 8% of the total). And all this while its main competitor, the New York Times, announced its accounts just yesterday: a 10.4% increase in total revenues (up to 804 million dollars), an increase of 450 thousand digital-only subscribers in the fourth quarter (up to 12.2 million out of 12.78 million in total). However, 'The Lady Grey''s share price fell on Wall Street, paying the price for the 10.5% increase in operating costs.