On Jan. 20, 2025, as Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, Jeff Bezos watched from his VIP seat. Bezos, like other tech moguls in attendance, would have lucrative business before the federal government, including billions in contracts for Blue Origin, Amazon Web Services and TeraWave satellites.
For Bezos, The Washington Post hasn’t been as lucrative. According to reporting by Alexandra Bruell at The Wall Street Journal, The Post lost more than $100 million in 2025 alone.
The Washington Post is a special news brand. It, of course, is a paper with monumental importance domestically and globally, but it’s also a local news brand. Like other papers, it has been challenged by an eroding business model, a lack of innovation and what members of the current newsroom described to E&P as an organization without a sustainability strategy.
The past year for The Post has been replete with headline-grabbing news. Former Publisher and CEO Will Lewis — who came with heavy baggage from the U.K. — lost the staff’s confidence.
Just five days before the inauguration, more than 400 Washington Post journalists petitioned Bezos for a leadership change, writing in part, “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave.”
After instituting deep personnel cuts in February 2026, which gutted the newsroom by a third and disproportionately affected journalists of color, according to the Guild’s analysis, Lewis was spotted enjoying Super Bowl festivities in San Francisco. Two days later, he tendered his resignation.
Bezos, who had been a somewhat hands-off owner, adopted a more hands-on approach to the opinion section, mandating that its writers be vociferously patriotic and unwaveringly in favor of “free markets and free people.” It cost the paper subscribers, its opinion editor, David Shipley, who resigned, and long-time editorial staff, like 14-year WaPo veteran Jennifer Rubin, who left to start a new Substack venture, The Contrarian, with co-founder Norm Eisen. She took a parting shot at Bezos, writing “The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management … have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his cronies accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.”
With fewer staff, entire departments shuttered, and international bureaus gutted at a time when the world is at war, the question arises: What will become of The Washington Post?
Data drives strategy
With Lewis’ departure, Bezos named Jeff D’Onofrio as acting publisher and CEO. D’Onofrio previously served as CFO for Raptive, a digital ad management company. He’d been CEO at Tumblr and served in management roles at Google, Zagat, Yahoo! and MLB Advanced Media. In the Feb. 7, 2026, D’Onofrio announcement, Bezos cited data as the guiding strategy: “The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity. Each and every day, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.”
It is unclear how metrics will inform newsroom operations, but reader data now drives a dynamic paywall and sets subscription pricing.
“The Post personalized its initial subscriber onboarding journey, doubling click-through rates and decreasing opt-outs by one-third. And The Post launched an AI-powered dynamic paywall, resulting in a 47% lift in subscription conversions, a 27% lift in registrations and a 21% higher lifetime value per user,” a spokesperson for The Post told E&P.
The Opinions section became more video-forward and launched new podcasts.
“Washington Post Opinion had 17 million pageviews in January 2026, the highest since July 2025,” the spokesperson reported to E&P. “We’re seeing a dramatic uptick in reader engagement.”
Loss of coverage, loss of talent
Through layoffs and buyouts, The Post lost an untold number of talented people and institutional knowledge.
Retired WaPo Executive Editor Marty Baron commented on the February layoffs on LinkedIn about The Post’s enduring business challenges and the loss of talent. In part, he wrote, “The Post’s challenges … were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top — from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away by the hundreds of thousands.
“The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall. Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos and jumped to other news organizations. They also, in effect, were driven away. Bezos’ sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
One of the now-shuttered departments is sports.
Washington, D.C., is Kevin Blackistone’s hometown. As a kid, he delivered The Post, and later in life, for a decade, he penned a national sports column for the paper. Today, he is a professor of practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Before The Post abandoned its sports coverage, local TV stations had canceled or greatly reduced their sports coverage, too, he said.
“Losing the local coverage of sports is a blow. I’m not just talking journalistically right now. I’m speaking as a Washingtonian and as a sports fan who devoured the sports pages,” he said.
“We have an NBA team, a Major League Baseball team, an NFL team, an NHL team, two professional soccer teams and the Arena Football League. And on top of that, you have a number of Division One college athletic programs, like Maryland, Howard, George Mason, George Washington, Towson and Bowie. Then there’s the high school sports scene, which is huge. All that coverage is gone,” he said.
It is difficult to imagine data showing that sports coverage was unpopular, but the new ethos in the newsroom is to provide subscribers with journalism they can’t get elsewhere. Perhaps that meant ceding coverage to outlets like ESPN, which hired some of The Post’s former sports team.
Eric Deggans — NPR’s critic at large, author of the Switching Codes blog on Substack, and Knight professor of journalism and media ethics at Washington and Lee University — spoke with E&P about The Post’s brand. He recalled the era of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, when pop culture fortified the newsroom’s image.
“You had movies and books reinforcing the idea of The Washington Post as an exemplar of journalism, of its investigative prowess, holding power to account and being a defender of democracy — everything we hope from the best news outlets. That image served The Post for a very long time and helped management when it was faced with tough decisions, because they knew the public was on the side of this gigantic brand. We come to the modern age, and I think that brand has faded a lot,” Deggans said.
Deggans cited Bezos’ public retooling of the opinion section as an unforced error, yet Bezos has been a smart steward of the paper in other ways, he said, including advocating for the newsroom when it’s come under attack by the government. That played out recently when Narrative Enterprise Reporter Hannah Natanson became embroiled in the Department of Justice’s whistleblower crusade. The FBI searched Natanson’s home and seized her digital devices. Bezos vowed to back the newsroom in its legal fight.
Jeffrey Leen spent nearly 27 years at The Washington Post before taking a buyout in 2023. When he started at the paper as a reporter in 1997, the newsroom was about 900 people, he recalled.
“One of my first projects won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal. It was on police shootings. It won the Pulitzer in 1999, and it was the first Public Service Pulitzer for the paper since Watergate,” he said. Over the years, as his career flourished and he became the editor of the investigations unit, he said there was “turmoil and lots of ups and downs.” Yet, the team would earn 10 more Pulitzers.
In 1997, the investigative team had nine members. Today, even after layoffs, the team is still roughly 25 people, and management deserves credit for “circling the wagons very smartly to protect the investigative mission,” he said. “It’s almost three times as big as the investigative unit I started on under Len Downie, and I think that’s gotten lost in a lot of what’s going on.”
Leen listed the investigative team’s recent, impactful work — reporting on Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Texas floods, Iranian ship movements, the D.C. plane crash, ICE shootings in Minnesota, and fraud at the Veterans Administration.
“I think investigations, in politics and national security — they’ve discovered this is the stuff people come to The Washington Post for,” Leen said.
From his perspective, The Post was plagued by a lack of innovation.
“When we had the Trump bump and got to 3 million subscribers, everything was great,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and said that we were doing a better job than The New York Times — this was in 2017-2018. But while we were feeling good about ourselves and riding that bump, The New York Times was innovating. They were doing Wordle and Wirecutter, cooking, games, live events and podcasts like ‘The Daily.’ They invested well, and they treated it all not like a hobby, but as life and death. And by the time we were getting ready to react, it was already too late.”
Though the newsroom’s “incredible stockpile of talent” is now diminished, he said, “There are still a lot of good people there, especially in the investigative unit. They are working hard. They’re very motivated, and they’re trying to fight the good fight.”
The Washington Post won the 2026 Toner Prize for National Political Reporting for a series of stories authored by Hannah Natanson, William Wan and Meryl Kornfield, about President Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies — and how that’s felt by Americans across the country.
A spokesperson for The Washington Post said the newsroom produced more than 330 scoops and exclusives in 2025 — and sold 675,000 subscriptions, the highest annual sales volume since 2021, excluding an election-driven spike in 2024.
Already, news outlets have set their sights on the voids left by The Post, including the Baltimore Banner, Axios, City Cast and The 51st. Semafor launched a new newsletter, promising “financial and global news that matters to D.C.” WaPo columnist Dana Milbank announced his departure from The Post on March 16, noting that he was joining a new venture backed by POLITICO founder Robert Allbritton. Milbank wrote on the X platform, “Allbritton and his team promise that we will ‘cover government, politics, policy, local news and D.C. sports with the power of The Washington Post in the 1970s, the punch of Politico in the 2010s and the audience focus required to build a sustainable news organization in 2026.’”
What should Bezos do?
Among the news community, there is no shortage of opinions about what Jeff Bezos should do with The Post. Some suggest he should sell it outright. Others would like to see it placed in a trust and endowed with a hefty sum.
NPR’s Eric Deggans suggested Bezos “should stop yoking what happens at The Post to how it affects his other businesses and go back to being the owner he was when he first bought the paper.” He pondered if the paper is chasing an audience it will never catch.
“This idea that news institutions are too left-wing and that if they can just be more accommodating to MAGA, it will restore trust in their work. It’s just not true. CNN proved it. CBS News is proving it. The Washington Post is proving it,” he said. “All they’re really doing is showing traditional news consumers that they’re changing the news content to serve the ideologies of the people who own their platforms, and that’s not what traditional news consumers want.”
In a March E&P column, Imtiaz Patel — former chief consumer officer at Gannett Media and CEO of the Baltimore Banner — wrote about visiting The Post just a few days after the February layoffs: “You can feel the immense history in those corridors, but also the profound sadness of what has become of this incredible institution. The people who are there still believe in the mission and want to uphold their journalism standards and traditions. Where they stand now was the natural outcome of poor executive decisions that go back many years, some strategic and some not grasping the reality of the underlying businesses, and how they missed an opportunity.” He advised the owner to consider selling off its Arc XP CMS solution, calling it a “distraction.”
Patel went on to suggest that one of The Post’s greatest assets is its proximity to policy and power, and that it should lean into B2B intelligence and continue building its events business.
As E&P was prepping this story for press, word came that Managing Editor Liz Seymour would be leaving The Post at the end of April. Reem Akkad — who held several senior roles at The Post — joined The Marshall Project as managing editor.
After 21 years at The Post, Peter Finn was appointed assistant managing editor at ProPublica, where he’ll oversee its Washington, D.C. bureau. “[Finn is] bringing a formidable track record of leading high-impact Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations and decades of experience navigating the complexities of national security and global affairs to the expanding Washington newsroom,” according to ProPublica’s announcement. The exodus of great talent continues.
Executive Editor Matt Murray sent an all-staff email on March 12, lauding the newsroom’s work. “[It] is a good reminder of several things,” he wrote. “One is that our staff is uniquely talented and smart. Another is that your work has impact and influence. A third is that this is journalism that meets what we have discussed: distinct, value-added, deeply reported, fair but uncompromising work that engages people and is found only in The Washington Post. Every day, you are showing why serious people who want to understand the world at a perilous moment need to engage with us. We should all be proud. While the noise eventually subsides, the work endures. Let’s keep going.”
That same day, The New York Times reported that its newsroom now employs 2,300 journalists.
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She has reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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BanishBias
The Post didn't suddenly go from a stellar operation to a horrible sinkhole when Bezos changed direction in the editing of its opinion section. Its business, which is a direct reflection of its journalistic ability, had been sliding for many years prior to the layoffs in early 2026, going all the way back to the mid-aughts. After the Great Recession sunk its teeth into the economy, quarterly results at the then publicly held company cratered, prompting layoffs in a continuous sequence of downsizing and the first of many, many cuts to coverage and, after years of bailing, causing the Grahams to jump ship and sell what had become a greatly devalued entity. Since Bezos bought the business in 2013, at a fraction of what he would have paid a decade earlier, the company has been able to hide behind the secrecy of private ownership, but the losses, by all reports, continued to mount and the editorial retrenchment kept to a sorry pace. Even during the frenzy of Trump I, there's no sign the paper made much money. It probably continued to operate at a loss, even during that brief, unsustainable upward jolt to its business in the late teens and early '20s. (And, please, if anybody has evidence that it actually made substantial money then, or any money at all, I'd like to see the income statements.) Of course, the losses in recent years have snowballed in response to poorer journalism, ineffective direction, bad management, declining revenue, and costs now too high to support even a greatly contracted operation. Some people as early as 2010 noted WashPo would end up on the path it's on now. They were right, and here we are.
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