It’s been another terrible week for the Washington Post. The newsroom is bracing for a devastating round of layoffs with rumors flying that some desks may be shuttered entirely. Sportswriters were stunned to learn they would no longer be attending the Winter Olympics in Italy (management later reversed course, saying a small contingent would cover the event), while the Post’s foreign correspondents have been pleading with owner Jeff Bezos to spare their department in desperate posts on X, noting the groundbreaking work they’ve done in Ukraine, the Middle East, Venezuela, and elsewhere at a time when Donald Trump’s foreign-policy activity has been frenetic. For the time being, no one knows how deep the cuts will actually be, but staffers are anticipating around 100 job losses in the roughly 800-person newsroom alone. One staffer told me that “every desk is allegedly losing jobs.” The expectation is they’ll hit next week.

The ostensible reason for the layoffs is that the Post, like many other newspapers, is losing money. But unlike other newspapers, the Post is also in the midst of a demoralizing destruction of its brand that has alienated hundreds of thousands of subscribers and left even its staff unsure of what the paper is trying to do, both journalistically and businesswise. “I’m increasingly finding it hard to justify the cuts from a journalistic perspective,” said one staffer. “Of course, financially, the Post is in a deep hole, and I understand that. But some of that hole, if not a lot of it, is because of Jeff Bezos.”

The Post was once known for its independent accountability journalism, dating back to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and running all the way through to January 6. It was also once known for being the foremost authority on goings-on in the nation’s capital. Now it no longer has a clear identity, a crucial component for any paper’s success, whether it’s the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. The Post finds itself in this no-man’s-land largely because of a series of editorial and business decisions made outside the newsroom at the highest level of the company — most notably, Bezos’s 11th-hour decision to pull the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala........

© Daily Intelligencer