What’s happening at The Washington Post

The paper has lost dozens of longtime journalists in a buyout offer ending July 31 that targeted the copy desks, opinion section, video staffers and employees who’d worked there for ten or more years, Axios says.

Here are details on the buyout packages, from Fox News. 

A separate Axios article is headlined “Washington Post talent exodus fuels speculation about its future.”

A Poynter opinion article asks, “How much longer can The Washington Post bleed talent?”

Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review says, “From the outside, there are several ways of interpreting all this. One (literally) cartoonish theory is that [Post owner Jeff] Bezos is now a thinly veiled Trump supplicant, who is trying his best to trash an independent news outlet.”

“I favor a different interpretation of the reorientation, which is less directly about Trump: that Bezos has become a rich anti-woke type, and is using the apparent permission structures of the new Trump age to channel this sensibility into his paper’s opinion pages, caring less than before that doing so might be perceived as a dishonorable encroachment,” Allsop says.

Allsop says so far, there’s no evidence that Bezos is meddling in the Post’s newsroom reporting.

Here is a running list of journalists who’ve left the Post since November, from Politico.