The Post's Audience of One
Over the past several days, as reports about The Washington Post’s looming layoffs have reverberated throughout the industry, staffers on the newspaper’s sports desk have quietly begun receiving phone calls from the section’s leadership. In the private conversations, according to people familiar with them, management has all but encouraged journalists to start looking for jobs elsewhere. Naturally, many staffers are interpreting the message from above as a clear signal that, at minimum, a majority of the team is headed for the chopping block.
“Everyone is preparing resumes, cover letters, reaching out to editors elsewhere,” one staffer at The Post told Status.
That grim mood on the sports desk is shared across other corners of the Jeff Bezos–owned, Will Lewis–led newsroom. As I’ve previously reported, an axe expected to fall on as many as 300 employees could swing imminently, possibly as soon as next week. The cuts, I’m told, will hit not just sports but also metro, international, and operational teams, marking one of the most severe rounds of layoffs in the storied newspaper’s nearly 150-year history.
Still, staffers are not surrendering without a fight. In a now-public appeal aimed squarely at Bezos and his one-time journalist wife, Lauren Sánchez, employees are hoping to persuade the pair to intervene—if not to stop the layoffs outright, then perhaps at least to blunt their scale. Behind the scenes, Status has learned that…
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The CBS logo at CBS Television City Studio. (Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Bari’s CBS Buyouts: Just one day after Bari Weiss alluded to future cuts as she laid out her vision for the future of CBS News to a room full of skeptical staffers, the network offered an unspecified number of buyouts to non-union “CBS Evening News” employees, Variety’s Brian Steinberg reported. The offers, which a person familiar with the matter confirmed to Status, come just weeks into Tony Dokoupil’s rocky tenure as anchor. While the cuts are limited to the evening broadcast, they are widely seen inside the network as…
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