What the Post Cuts Will Do

With a third of its staff gone, the Post won’t be able to deliver on the vision its leadership has laid out.

Yesterday, hundreds of Washington Post journalists and supporters amassed in below-freezing temperatures outside the paper’s K Street headquarters to take part in a rally held by the Washington Post Newspaper Guild and the Washington Post Tech Guild. A veteran Post staffer said it was larger than any walkout or picket he’d seen in his time there. The day before, during a Zoom call with staff, Post leadership had announced sweeping cuts, laying off about three hundred journalists, who represent a third of the newsroom—an extraordinary blow to the paper’s capacity and ambition. Now the Washington Post Newspaper Guild was organizing a GoFundMe for laid-off colleagues and international staff not covered by the union and vowing to claw back lost jobs and negotiate for strong severance packages. “We’re told to do more with less, then even more with less. Write faster, publish more, make no mistakes,” Michael Brice-Saddler, an outgoing Post reporter who covered Washington, DC, for the past six years, said. “But the margin of error for us keeps shrinking, while for those on the ninth floor, it keeps growing.” Journalists from Al Jazeera and the New York Times packed in. People handed out donuts.