A weekly newsletter on power and the press Good morning. Les Carpenter was in Milan to cover the Winter Olympics on Wednesday when he got an email notifying him he’d been laid off by the Washington Post. Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson was “in the middle of a warzone,” as she put it, when she got the news. Most of the 300-plus journalists laid off were in more comfortable surroundings, after management asked staffers to stay home and Zoom into executive editor Matt Murray’s announcement about “significant actions across the company.” The cuts gutted sports and foreign coverage, metro, and books. Photographers were let go. A signature podcast was put on ice. It was a bloodbath, a stunning purge of institutional knowledge, talent and experience. With owner Jeff Bezos and CEO and publisher Will Lewis absent, Murray was left to pitch the culling as a “strategic reset.” It wasn’t until Saturday that Bezos and Lewis issued public statements, after Lewis stepped down following a rocky two-year tenure amid widespread criticism. “It leaves some small hope that we’ve hit rock bottom,” one Post staffer said of Lewis' exit. “But I’ve thought that before.” Chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio will serve as interim CEO as the paper charts its path forward. Sure, the Post will lose less money with hundreds fewer journalists, but it’s hard to see how the paper – which still has many excellent reporters and editors — will be a better overall product in the short or long term. “I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” Bob Woodward said. “They deserve more.” While Woodward didn’t mention Bezos by name, Carl Bernstein, the other half of the legendary Watergate duo, was more cutting in his remarks. “Today’s owner of The Washington Post is one of the five richest people on the planet,” Bernstein said. “His responsibilities ought to be, above all, to enlarge those journalistic and democratic possibilities: and not, as we have witnessed this past year at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, to curtail and demean them.” That same morning, the New York Times announced a strong fourth quarter, pulling in more than $800 million in revenue and adding 450,000 digital subscribers. With a whopping 12.7 million total subscribers, the paper is closing in on its goal of 15 million by the end of 2027. The contrast was stark. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien touted the Times’ diversified portfolio – Games, Cooking, The Athletic — on an investor call playing out during Murray’s grim Zoom gathering. She spoke about how the Times will continue to “thoughtfully invest, making what we do more rare and more valuable to more people.” As the Times trumpets growth and the Post goes into survival mode, many top-tier journalists are looking for work. Some ex-Post journalists have already set up shop on Substack, as others seek assignments. “Picked up my notebook this morning — full of notes from a recent reporting trip — and got hit with another wave of grief over all the stories that now won't be told,” Johnson wrote on X, adding that she’s aiming to work in Kyiv “should anyone need a dogged, empathetic reporter.” Carpenter stayed in Milan to finish his Olympics assignment as the Post guild negotiates its settlement with the paper, writing a profile Friday on U.S. figure skating star Ilia Malinin. “People are still paying for the paper,” Carpenter told the CBC shortly after getting the news. “They’re owed something.” Michael Calderone 
When Washington Post foreign correspondents pleaded with owner Jeff Bezos last month to preserve global coverage, they reminded him of the commitment he made upon buying the paper in 2013. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best,” Bezos said at his first staff town hall. “And at worst, it leads to extinction.” Now Post journalists are living out that grim reality... 
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