Washington Post eliminates nearly two dozen newsroom positions citing ‘economic climate’

The Washington Post eliminated the jobs of nearly two dozen newsroom staffers on Tuesday, the latest in a slew of cuts made by the nation’s biggest media and tech companies in recent weeks.

The Post, which is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and has a staff of hundreds, said 20 current newsroom positions would be cut and an additional 30 open positions would not be filled.

“Newsroom leaders made these decisions after a thoughtful and deliberate review of our current roles and vacant positions.  We prioritized the elimination of vacancies to minimize the impact on employees,” executive editor Sally Buzbee wrote in a Tuesday memo to staff shared with The Hill. “We are also eliminating currently filled positions we concluded are not essential to serving our competitive needs.”

The cuts, Buzbee wrote to her staff, are “necessary for us to stay competitive, and the economic climate has guided our decision to act now.”

“We believe these steps will ultimately help us to fulfill our mission to scrutinize power and empower readers,” she said. “We are not planning further job eliminations at this time.”

The threat of impending layoffs had been hanging over the Post’s newsroom for weeks. Last month, Publisher Fred Ryan was shouted at by angry staffers during a town-hall style meeting at the outlet’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters after he told them he anticipated cuts to the company’s budget.

The newspaper’s workers union, one of the largest of any media company in the country, called the Post’s decision “unacceptable.”

“Since the town hall, we have received no clear explanation for why the layoffs are happening despite numerous attempts to get answers,” the union said in a statement to The Hill. “As far as we can tell, these layoffs are not financially necessary or rooted in any coherent business plan from Fred Ryan, who said at the same town hall that he expects the company to be larger a year from now.”

The Post is just the latest in a string of major media companies to conduct layoffs, job reductions or make other cost cutting measures amid declining ad revenue, general news fatigue in the post-Trump media environment and concerns about the country’s broader economic outlook.

CNN, Vox Media and NPR have all made cuts to their budgets in recent weeks that have affected their newsrooms, while the Post shuttered its weekly Sunday magazine in December along with a handful of jobs.

Late last summer, The New York Times, the Post’s top competitor, reported extensively on the outlet’s struggles with digital subscriptions and revenue in recent months.