Washington Post’s White House team urges Jeff Bezos to halt massive newsroom cuts

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — With widespread layoffs expected at The Washington Post in the coming weeks, teams of reporters are sending impassioned letters to owner Jeff Bezos, urging him not to shrink the newsroom.

In a letter obtained by CNN, the newspaper’s White House reporters banded together to defend some of the desks facing major cutbacks.

“If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are,” bureau chief Matt Viser wrote in one of the Post’s internal Slack channels on Thursday morning.

The accompanying letter, signed by Viser and all seven other White House reporters, makes the case for a “diversified Washington Post.” And it tries to speak Bezos’s language, appealing to him with data and a determination to grow the Post.

“In a typical month,” the letter said, “some of us have found that more than half of the new subscribers we brought to The Post came from stories and scoops that relied on desks such as International and Metro.”

Those stories included recent scoops about the US military action in Venezuela and President Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.

“Our colleagues’ work helps lift up our own,” the reporters wrote.

A spokesperson for The Post declined comment to CNN about the looming layoffs.

The incoming cuts…

The unusual public pleas to Bezos have come after several private signals about imminent cuts, including an internal memo saying the Post no longer planned to send any reporters to the Winter Olympics in February.

Reporters fear that the Post is slashing its way to irrelevance; moreover, they wonder whether Bezos, who bought the publication more than a decade ago, cares about it anymore.

Thus, the staffers are going over the head of the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, and trying to get Bezos’s attention directly.

International correspondents, anticipating reductions to their ranks, wrote to Bezos last weekend and said “robust, powerful foreign coverage is essential to the Washington Post’s brand and its future success in whatever form the paper takes moving forward.”

A second letter, from more than two dozen DC-area beat reporters, emphasized the importance of local coverage. “Should you allow Post management to lay off the local staff, which has been cut in half in the last five years, the effect on this region and the people in it will be immeasurable,” the reporters wrote.

The new letter from the White House reporters is a bit different because there is no indication that their jobs are at risk.

Instead, Lewis has spoken privately about focusing the Post’s investment on politics and a few other key areas, while cutting back in areas like sports and foreign affairs.

“But some of our most impactful, most-read articles… have relied on collaboration with all corners of the newsroom,” the White House reporters told Bezos.

After several tumultuous years and previous rounds of staff reductions, reporters who have stayed at the Post, even when offered buyout opportunities to leave, say the staff is at a breaking point.

“There’s now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post,” one veteran correspondent said.

The person pointed out that Bezos made changes to the Opinion section that cost the Post dearly. Bezos axed a planned editorial page endorsement of Kamala Harris in late 2024, leading to mass cancellations by concerned subscribers, and then announced a more Trump-aligned mission for the Opinion pages in early 2025, causing even more upheaval.

Bezos and Lewis “drove us into a ditch with their decisions, particularly the reinvention of the Opinion section, costing us hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” the correspondent said. “Now it looks like the staff will pay for it.”

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