After WaPo Axed 30% Of Staff, We Now Learn They Lost $100 Million Last Year – Again
The The Washington Post lost more than $100 million last year, WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter – which explains why Jeff Bezos axed 30% of the newspaper’s workforce three weeks ago, including CEO and publisher Will Lewis.
The 2025 loss matches 2024 – when it also lost $100 million, which followed a $77 million loss in 2023, the people said. So, nearly $300 million in losses in three years.
The Post, long associated with its reporting on the Watergate scandal and publication of the Pentagon Papers, has struggled to adapt to a media landscape defined by declining web traffic, shifting reader habits and intense competition for digital advertising. Like many legacy publishers, it has sought to build a sustainable subscription business while navigating the dominance of large technology platforms in distributing news.
In a staff meeting Wednesday, acting Chief Executive and Publisher Jeff D’Onofrio and Executive Editor Matt Murray outlined what they described as years of overspending and falling productivity. The presentation marked their first major address to employees since the layoffs.
According to people who attended, D’Onofrio said expenses exceeded revenue between 2022 and 2025, reflecting a hiring surge in earlier years that added hundreds of staff members. He did not detail the full extent of the losses during the meeting.
The number of news stories published has declined by 42% since 2020, D’Onofrio said, even as newsroom costs in 2025 were 16% higher than in 2020. The figures highlight the strain of maintaining a large reporting staff amid slowing audience growth.
Murray, who previously served as editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and took the top editorial role at the Post in June 2024, acknowledged what he called “the painfulness of the moment.” He signaled a shift in editorial priorities, urging staff to be more selective.
“We don’t want or need to do every story or jump on everything that happens,” Murray said, according to attendees. “We’re not a paper of record; there’s no such thing anymore in today’s world.”
Still, he emphasized ambition. “We want to be distinctive, urgent, must-read with every chance we have,” he said.
D’Onofrio assumed his current role earlier this month following the departure of publisher and chief executive Will Lewis. He told staff he is developing a broader strategic plan to stabilize the organization.
“Bear with me, because that will take some time and obvious care, but I’m keen to get going on it,” he said. “And we are going to go after it, and we’re going to go after it hard, because we owe it to this place to do that.”
Three weeks ago in a staff call, Murray told employees that the company had been losing too much money for too long, and had not been meeting readers’ needs. As a result, all sections will be affected in some way, and what rises from the ashes would be a publication more focused on national news and politics, business, and health, and less on other things.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Murray also said that search traffic has plummeted nearly in half over the last three years, partly due to the rise of generative AI – and that the Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
The Atlantic, of course, painted WaPo’s mass firings as a ‘murder’ – as opposed to a suicide.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/26/2026 – 12:40
