MSN - 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 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 Harris in 2024, which led to 250,000 digital readers cancelling their subscriptions in protest of Bezos’s apparent kowtowing to Trump.
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