"It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper's staff. We-I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time-had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had."
"Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. 'I finally concluded that I could provide runway-financial runway-because I don't think you can keep shrinking the business,' he said. 'You can be profitable and shrinking. And that's a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.'"
"But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2013, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors."
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 and promised financial runway to halt newsroom shrinkage. Initial years included profitable periods driven by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. Losses accumulated later, including seventy-seven million dollars in 2013 and another hundred million in 2024. Bezos responded to large losses with voluntary buyouts in 2023 and 2025 that reduced newsroom staff from over a thousand to under eight hundred. Those cuts eliminated prominent writers and editors, weakened institutional capacity, and preceded further announced "significant actions" signaling additional contraction.
Read at The New Yorker
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