Washington: Rivan Stinson was at home when she received an email from The Washington Post during the week, telling her she had been laid off. “It’s a very sad day – sucky situation for me and my colleagues,” the former audience editor says. “Really smart, great journalists. People make this paper. People make the Post.”
Around her, the crowd begins chanting: “Save the Post!” Hundreds of reporters, photographers, unionists and supporters of the storied newspaper have gathered in the middle of Washington, a block from this masthead’s office, to protest brutal job cuts that will eliminate as much as a third of the newsroom.
Even in ordinary times, that would constitute a bloodbath. In an era of great upheaval, when accountability in the US capital has arguably never been more important, it’s a dagger through one of America’s legendary news brands.
Timmy Le, an IT worker at the Post, says several members of his team were laid off, including a woman who is due to give birth in a month. He blames the newspaper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is reportedly close to $US250 billion ($356 billion).
“How can you do that to someone, especially if you’re one of the richest men in the world?” Le says. “He’s not saying anything, he’s not lifting a finger to help, so I feel like there’s an ulterior motive. It seems purposeful, what he’s doing.” And what is that, exactly? “Destroy the Post.”
The notion that Bezos is mounting an inside job to dismantle the famed newspaper he purchased for $US250 million in 2013 was popular at Friday’s rally.
Post staff are scarred and angered by what they regard as a series of own-goals, including Bezos’s decision to scrap an editorial that would have endorsed Kamala Harris for president ahead of the 2024 election. The column had already been drafted by staff.
Bezos and publisher William Lewis said it was a policy change to no longer endorse presidential candidates in any future election. But the decision – 11 days before the election – prompted scores of readers to cancel their subscriptions: upwards of 250,000, according to reports at the time, or 10 per cent of the total.
Then there was Bezos’s announcement early last year, with Donald Trump back in the Oval Office, that the Post’s opinion pages would no longer bring readers a multitude of views, but would advocate each day for “personal liberties and free markets”.
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so”, and that meant evangelising freedom, Bezos said.
Meanwhile, like so many of America’s billionaires, Bezos has cosied up to Trump. He attended the president’s inauguration, to which Amazon donated $US1 million; the company has also donated to Trump’s White House ballroom. And it invested a total of $US75 million in Melania, a documentary about first lady Melania Trump.
Bezos is also familiar with how Trump treats media outlets that scrutinise him. In his first term, he frequently lashed out at the Post and Bezos, labelling him “Jeff Bozo”.
The narrative that Bezos is gutting the Post to reduce scrutiny of the president has emotive appeal, but does it stand up to scrutiny? The harsh reality is that the paper was in trouble before Bezos bought it, and despite the media boon of Trump 1.0 – the “Trump Bump”, as it is often called – the business has failed to prosper over the long term, unlike some major competitors.
On the same day as the Post swung the axe, The New York Times announced it had added 1.4 million digital subscribers in 2025, driven by upgrades to new family subscriptions, and a surge in revenue. As well as news coverage, the Times has enjoyed global success with its mix of games, recipes and other innovations.
The News Corp-owned The Wall Street Journal also boosted subscriptions by 11 per cent to 4.7 million, and the company has just launched a new product on the US west coast, The California Post.
At Friday’s protest, John Kelly, a 34-year Washington Post veteran who took redundancy in 2023, said Bezos’ money was initially good for the struggling operation.
“When the Graham family sold the paper to Jeff Bezos, it was because they realised they could not just keep cutting the costs and laying off staff and still have a quality product that readers would like,” Kelly said.
“[Bezos] allowed the Post to grow. He stopped the haemorrhaging of people. The newsroom got bigger and the aspirations of the paper got even bigger.”
One of those expansions was to Australia, where Michael Miller became the paper’s first – and now, it seems, last – Sydney bureau chief. International coverage was hit particularly hard in the cuts, along with the Washington metro desk and the sports section.
But the cuts do not appear directed at national political coverage; areas that would lessen scrutiny of the Trump administration. The paper’s editor, Matt Murray, told staff the intention was to refocus on core areas of national news, politics, business and health. “We can’t be everything to everyone,” he said.
Brian Stelter, media analyst for CNN, said those who assumed Bezos was shrinking the Post to curry favour with Trump should “look a little closer”.
“The Post did not decimate its political reporting team,” he wrote on X. “The proverbial thorns in the side of the Trump administration are, for the most part, still there. The overhauled Opinion section still regularly criticises Trump and his administration (though not as forcefully as before).”
However, Bezos has been criticised inside and outside the Post for failing to stand up – publicly, at least – against attacks on the freedom of the press. Last month, FBI agents raided the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who covers the federal government, and had recently written about the deluge of tips she received over the past year from aggrieved government workers.
Natanson was not the target of the investigation. Agents were looking for evidence against a Maryland man – a contractor with a high security clearance – who had already been arrested and accused of mishandling classified information. But the unusual move of raiding a reporter’s home alarmed journalism advocates and the Post.
“There have been incredible movies against the press, and for Jeff Bezos not to come out and protest this and restate his commitment to his employees at his newspaper is really sad,” says Kelly, the former Post veteran.
“We’re at a point when the White House itself retweets digitally altered photographs; when it puts out AI videos; when it lies about facts. It’s not a time for fewer newspapers and media outlets to hold these people to account – it’s a time for greater scrutiny.”
After the rally, I ask Post journalist Katie Mettler – a union member who has covered government and criminal justice in nearby Maryland – whether Bezos could be expected to indefinitely prop up a loss-making venture.
“I think he can if he’s the fourth-richest person in the history of the world,” she says. Mettler is among those staffers who look at Bezos’s ventures – sending Katy Perry into space with his rocket company Blue Origin, for example – and wonder why it’s the Post that is seen as profligate spending.
But if profitability is the imperative, Mettler says, “He should stop making choices that are losing us money, losing us readers, losing us loyalty, losing us trust.”
She says she has been writing memos for years about things the Post could do to pivot to the future and build trust with readers.
“The argument we’ve made again and again and again is that in the nation’s capital, local news is national news is international news,” Mettler says.
“We are the hometown newspaper of the United States of America, and it is our primary function to hold power to account.
“We are seeing unprecedented attacks on the press in our country. We are seeing grabs of federal power that are deeply impacting people across the nation and the world.
“And it is unfathomable to me that anybody who’s serious about protecting the principles of democracy and transparency and fairness, could think that this is a good idea – particularly right now.”
On the weekend, Bob Woodward – the legendary Post journalist who broke the Watergate story with colleague Carl Bernstein – said he was “crushed” by the cuts, and the readers deserved better.
“Under executive editor Matt Murray there have been many superb and excellent ground-breaking stories,” Woodward said. “There will be more. I will do everything in my power to help make sure the Washington Post thrives and survives.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.