The NYT says WaPo is laying off about 30 percent of all employees, including more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/business/media/washington-post-layoffs.html
@briankrebs Sorry, man.
Bezos is wealthy enough to run the Washington Post as a freebie, if he wanted to do so.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/02/jeff-bezos-destroy-washington-post
Why won't he just donate it as a nonprofit like The Guardian?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/27/best-of-politico-magazine-2025-00704341
Still wondering how his greed, hubris, and Kompromat fed into this decision.
https://www.theverge.com/amazon/667916/jeff-bezos-amazon-saudi-arabia-jamal-khashoggi
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51210743
https://www.wired.com/story/bezos-phone-hack-mbs-saudi-arabia/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/29/apple-iphone-bezos-hack/
@briankrebs I know most people care about the Post for national political coverage, but it was also once DC's primary local news source. For those looking for local DC journalism, I'd encourage them to support 51st.news, which rose from the ashes of DCist after WAMU unceremoniously shuttered it.
Good coverage from The New Yorker
"The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focusing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone."
@briankrebs The metro section is important local news.
@briankrebs everything billionaires touch dies.
@briankrebs
RE
"...broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.”
So this is to fix #washingtonpost loosing MONEY?
The money lost is a drop in #bezos bucket, annual losses is $100 million, Bezos makes that in one week‼️
How about EDITING the writing in areas of #sportsnews that will make money?
🥶
He didn't endorse #HarrisWalz this is his tell
@briankrebs "Authority," oh my. I imagine the only part of that that's left is the morgue and I'd expect that to be whitewashed soon.
Oof. Like an ad for an airline right next to a story about a plane crash. From The New Yorker article:
"It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration."
"As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration."
@briankrebs he published Democracy Dies in Darkness as an announcement, not a warning.
Senator Bernie Sanders
@sanders.senate.gov
If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
Democracy dies in oligarchy.
@briankrebs
Is Amazon planning layoffs? How many employees are expected to be affected in the US and worldwide?
@briankrebs "appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration" is the understatement of the year.
@briankrebs if DAVOS occurred in a restaurant in NYC it would be considered racketeering
@briankrebs
Jeff Bezos = Lex Luthor, minus the charm.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” was a mission statement.
...dispatches from a nation collapsing under the weight of total corruption
apparently, bezos is ok with democracy dying in darkness. or at least dying in a spray on tan.
The boycott has been effective
The NYT says WaPo is laying off about 30 percent of all employees, including more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/business/media/washington-post-layoffs.html
@briankrebs I wonder how much revenue declined because WaPo started sane-washing Trump and then stopped the staff’s endorsement of Harris?
That is why I cancelled my subscription.
Their “Democracy Dies in the Dark” slogan became too much hypocrisy for me to swallow.
@briankrebs Bezos/Lewis will run it into the ground, by no longer focusing on factual reporting and adopting a once fringe lunatic MAGA/MAHA focus whike introducing AI hog slop a la Fuckbook. Just like Weiss and CBS. Both all in on trumpian alternative facts.
@briankrebs "In a staff meeting in 2024, Mr. Lewis, [the publisher hired by Bezos] warned that The Post was in trouble. “We are losing large amounts of money,” he said. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”
Ugh, no. A lot of us stopped reading the WAPO after Bezos started putting his finger on what could and couldn't be published... #WAPO #WashingtonPost
@briankrebs makes sense, they are no longer a newspaper, just a tRump ball-licking enterprise, so... why bother have PEOPLE around to write something beyond stenography?
@briankrebs Man, as someone who applied for WaPo internships from j school in the 90s this bums me out so much.
(But brings me a little joy to see "less" and "fewer" used correctly)
@briankrebs it's a genuine shame what's been done to that paper.
@briankrebs Seriously, I don't understand why the ex-pats don't form an enity called "realWashingtonPost".
I would pay.
I'm already paying some of them.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-killing-of-the-post
@briankrebs Meanwhile Lizzie Johnson has been laid off by WaPo in Kiev, in the middle of winter in a war zone, without electricity, running water, or heat: https://bsky.app/profile/alexip718.com/post/3me2enjr6ss2d
