A Dismantling of the Washington Post

“Our leadership destroyed our brand.”

In a staffwide call with employees Wednesday morning, Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Washington Post, and Wayne Connell, the paper’s chief human resources officer, announced sweeping staff cuts. “Every department across the newsroom will be impacted to some degree,” Murray said, in a recording of the call shared with CJR. The sports department and books section will be closed; Post Reports, a politics podcast, will be suspended. The paper’s international footprint will shrink, though Murray told staff, “We will continue to have a strategic overseas presence in close to a dozen locations with a focus on national security issues.” The metro team will be restructured. The number of editors at the Post will be “significantly reduced”; art teams will be merged. “These moves are painful,” Murray said. “This is a tough day.”

Politics and government, Murray told staff, will remain the largest part of the Post news operation. “A strategic reset is needed,” he said. “Over the years we simply haven’t evolved our model, or many operations and processes as much as we should have,” he added. “These are difficult, really disappointing realities to wrap our heads around,” he said. “There’s no one event, no easy point of blame we can point to, it’s built up over a long time.” Some reporters from the sports team, he noted, will be reassigned to the features desk. Among the journalists losing their jobs are Ishaan Tharoor, Eva Dou, Jesus Rodriguez, Dino Grandoni, and Nilo Tabrizy, who just last week was given a laurel by CJR for deeply personal, effective coverage of the events unfolding in Iran. Caroline O’Donovan, who has covered Amazon for the Post, is also being laid off, along with the full lineup of correspondents and editors covering the Middle East and both the Ukraine bureau chief, Siobhán O’Grady, and correspondent, Lizzie Johnson.