'Gutting it for no reason': Former Washington Post reporter reacts to mass layoffs

I was there when a

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Joe

Russian missile hit a Ukrainian playground and killed nine kids.

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I was there on a fishing boat in the middle of the South China Sea when Chinese Coast Guard ships showed up to assert their claim over contested territory.

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I was there when the

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Taliban tightened their grip on Afghanistan.

I was there in January 2020 outside of Wuhan when China shut it down to contain a mysterious virus.

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I'm in Kfar Aza, one of the frontline villages that was just cleared of Hamas fighters last night.

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International reporters are your eyes and ears around the world.

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Washington needs us.

The world needs us.

Jeff, please save us, save the post.

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God.

That was part of a video posted on social media last week by the Ukraine Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, Siobhan O'Grady, begging billionaire Jeff Bezos not to cut the paper's foreign department.

Those layoffs were among hundreds announced across several departments yesterday in a move affecting nearly one-third of the iconic paper's staff, including some journalists still actively in the field.

Reporter Lizzie Johnson wrote on X that she was laid off while still in Ukraine covering the war.

I can't. I mean, come on.

It really is, really is remarkable.

I'll tell you what else is remarkable, just the heartlessness, the cruelty.

It's unnecessary. He's a billionaire. It's unnecessary. He doesn't have to happen.

Well, I'm talking about the stupidity that I saw yesterday by people on the Maga right going, well, they deserved it. They're works.

Like, now, seriously?

Now, what happened was Jeff Bezos lurched, running desperately in the arms of Donald Trump.

After Donald Trump got elected, and he's he decided they were going to change, first of all, they were going to get rid of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

At the last second, and then try to change their their ideological viewpoint. Now, I mean, people could say, oh, well, they're only appealing to 40% of the country that might be center left.

Now, probably more like 45, now, probably more like 50% of the country that's deeply disturbed by what's going on on the right, but as Gerard Baker said yesterday,

40% of the country, that's over 120, 130 million people, that's a pretty good audience to have.

This was not brought on by the great reporters in the field that we just saw.

This was brought on by fear, by fear from Jeff Bezos, by desperation that somehow his main interest, which by the way, journalism, not in the top 30 for him.

But his main interest actually might be damaged because what the Washington Post dared to write, dared to report, when they dared to tell, so all of this garbage about it's their own fault.

The stupidity and the cruelty is crazy.

This was a paper that was doing extraordinarily well just a few years ago before Jeff Bezos got scared under the leadership of Fred Ryan for a long time and Marty Baron.

I mean, our

next

guest

can

tell

us

how successful that paper was.

Not only financially, but also the remarkable number of awards.

that they brought in for their extraordinary reporting.

Let's bring in right now political analyst.

Staff writer at the Atlantic, Ashley Parker.

Her new piece is monthly titled The Murder of the Washington Post.

Ashley, um, feel free.

Take it.

Go.

I mean, this is, this is something.

You know, I, when I was in Washington, I,

you know, I told Bill Maher on last week that

I always felt like I was getting away with something.

When I got to see Johnny Carson every night.

When I moved to Washington, D.C.

and I could read the, I could just go to a newsstand and get the Washington Post every morning.

I'm like,

how lucky can somebody be?

It's a great paper.

It was a great paper up until about a year and a half ago.

Talk about what happened.

I mean, I, I would argue first, it still is a great paper.

And, and they are absolutely gutting it for no reason.

But, look, it seems very clear that Jeff Bezos wants to curry

favor with Donald Trump.

Um, and, you know, that is his right to do so on the editorial side.

It wasn't good business, it lost a lot of subscribers.

But that is his right.

But the irony is, if he has been reading any of his own paper's coverage of Donald Trump,

going back to the first term, he should understand that this is a fool's mission.

Trump will never be satisfied.

If the day that he is hoping to get the Blue Origin contract from NASA, there's a, you know,

they say they're doubling down on politics.

There's a political story that Donald Trump doesn't like.

He will still be punished.

So this is all for nothing.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is as an owner, Jeff Bezos deserves a competent publisher.

And if his goal is to run the post into the ground, Will Lewis isn't even equipped to do that.

So he's been ill-served by his current publisher regardless of what his mission or his goal is.

But what I really wanted to capture in my piece is not just, as I write at the beginning,

that we're witnessing a murder.

But what makes the post so special and what is really being lost, and this has been the post before I got there,

and and this will be the post since I've left and even with all of these changes.

It's sort of the pulsing humanity that is at the core of that publication.

And the teamwork and the collaboration and the collegiality and what the post was able to do, which most major newspapers have struggled,

is to sort of keep that scrappy underdog sense of fun.

Sense of camaraderie, sense of we really love each other and our family.

That you have at a local paper while operating on a national scale.

among the best of the best.

And that's what's being lost.

So, so, I've never met Will Lewis.

But I will tell you, I've yet to hear one good thing said about him.

From news people on both sides of the Atlantic, whether I'm talking to people in Washington,

in New York, or in London.

They all say the same thing.

He is ill-equipped to run the Washington Post.

from reading the coverage, again, not knowing him at all.

That seems to be a common thread that that that once he took over.

The paper was directionalist.

had had no mission other than to sort of stay in this crouching position and fire people.

Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the years under his tenure,

which is about two now.

He, he had a lot of turgid corporate speak.

Um, no real ideas.

Even the ideas he claimed to try to launch, not only were they not launched,

but they were never even successfully attempted to launch.

He has a reputation for barely showing up to work.

Showing up late when he does.

Um, in, you know, the, the one thing that became clear, his sense of a, what sufficed as a business plan,

was contempt for a talented and hard-working newsroom.

And that's why you saw a lot of people leaving the post.

Uh, even in the under his reign, because a lot of people

didn't want to work for someone who didn't have a business plan, couldn't articulate a vision.

Didn't seem to have much courage.

But in lieu of that, seemed to absolutely disdain the reporters.

That's not a successful business model.

And it tells you everything about his leadership that he was not the one who

communicated directly these layoffs yesterday, despite the fact he's the publisher of the newspaper.

He put that on someone else.

Um, so Ashley, when Jeff Bezos

buys the Washington Post in August of 2013.

There is a lot of hope, um, some skepticism and questions about what his agenda was.

But also, if the richest guy in the world wants to come and save the Washington Post,

and perhaps save journalism.

Well, that's a good thing.

So what happened from there over these dozen or so years since?

So again, it's interesting.

I was actually not at the post when Bezos bought it originally.

But, but I was a beneficiary of his ownership.

He gave the post sort of the money and the backing to match our ambition.

And for many years, in my view, he was a fantastic owner.

He didn't meddle in the news side at all.

I covered Trump in his first term for the Washington Post.

Uh, I remembered Amazon and Bezos lost some government contracts.

We were called the Amazon Washington Post.

Uh, Trump was very punitive, wanted to punish him.

And Jeff Bezos never blinked.

So I don't, so the Bezos we're seeing now feels like a very different version.

uh, than the one I sort of came to respect as the owner when I joined.

I'm not exactly sure what happened.

Um, he, he doesn't talk to me a ton in person.

He comes to the newsroom sometimes when we won Pulitzers and stuff like that.

But he was a a spectral presence.

Which frankly is what an owner should be.

But my best guess as to what happened is Trump won a second term.

And you saw at the inauguration, a lot of these tech bros and oligarchs decided

that the first term wasn't a fever dream, that this guy was here to stay.

And that if they cared about their business interests, they were willing to abandon their principles.

Or what they had claimed at least for their principles.

Ashley, this is like talking about a death in the family.

What's happened to the Washington Post?

But could you talk about your memories, your recollections, and they're quite recent, I would imagine.

Well, I know they are quite recent.

About the, the, the pulse of a newsroom.

And it's a reflection of the city that it represents.

And the city that it writes about, not just the big international or national stories, but about the pulse of D.C. itself and its relationship to journalism and covering a city and covering the news that happens every day that people depend on getting from their paper, the Washington Post.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to start by talking in really personal terms.

Which is I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland.

I was raised on the Washington Post.

Uh, we recently found my younger sister's baby book, uh, she's a second child.

So most of the pages were blank.

But the ones that were filled in, my dad had literally written news of the day.

From the Washington Post.

When she was born, my dad taught me how to follow football, the then Redskins.

I was lucky, I was 10, we started watching in 1992.

Unfortunately, the last year they won the Super Bowl.

The post was where I read about quarterback Mark Rippin, um, whose jersey I still have.

And Joe Gibbs.

And cut out pictures to put on my walls.

The post was where when there was a drunk driving accident.

Uh, I was in middle school then.

A devastating, uh, four girls at the high school I was going to go to.

The post was where I went to make sense of what had happened.

To to understand, um, some of those articles, frankly, are the reason that among the many, many bad decisions my friends and I made,

we never drove drunk.

And the post was why I wanted to become a journalist.

It's why so many people wanted to become a journalist.

For a lot of people, it was Woodward and Bernstein.

For me, I'll just say,

it was the style section.

That was what I turned to first.

I mean, the post style section competed with the new journalism magazine era of the greats.

I can list off the names now of all of these people.

I loved, I read, I poured over the stories trying to understand.

How did they do it?

How did they land that sparkling flourish?

How did they leave me in tears or in laughter by the end?

So this is a paper that is like imbued in the fabric of the city.

And you also can't disentangle.

I, I know you said, you know, take it away from the national, the global stories.

But a city like Washington, the local stories also are the national stories.

September 11th, you know, when the plane crashed into Pentagon.

That was a local story.

It was a national story.

The decisions made here in Washington, in this city, led to the global war on terror.

There's no other paper like that.

And let's talk a little bit more, Ashley, about, and I

have been in big city newsrooms, I know what that is like.

Let's talk about a little more about what has been lost.

We should also note, speaking of Jeff Bezos, the reporter who covered Amazon got laid off yesterday.

Um, you know, the book section gone.

Culture section gone.

You started to mention sports section.

The Washington Post legendary sports section.

Dan Jenkins, like Will Bond, Tony Kornheiser.

The list goes on and on.

Yesterday, the Washington Wizards, this city's NBA team, made a huge trade.

Washington Post didn't have anyone to cover it because they don't have a sports section.

And I think that is, it is an international paper.

It's a national paper.

But it's also people who live here.

And talk to us just about what it's like to have it such an institution, an institution hollowed out.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's exactly it.

Washington is a huge sports town.

The idea that you would lay off almost your entire sports section.

I mean,

it's it's a disservice to the community.

It also makes no business sense.

But to give you a sense of what is lost again.

I mean, for me, it's just so personal, so I'm going to talk about it in personal terms.

I was on the Metro yesterday.

Um, as the news, we, we knew this was coming, but as the names of the actual people laid off.

Uh, some of my closest friends and some people I'd never even spoken to.

But who I respected from afar for how hard working they are.

I started tearing up.

I mean, I actually, I kind of started weeping.

So I'm on the Metro, I'm crying, I'm wearing my Washington Post winter hat.

Which I always wear.

It's just my winter hat.

And a woman, a total stranger, just leaned over and gave me a hug.

Because it wasn't just a loss for me, it wasn't just a loss for all of these talented hard-working journalists who lost their jobs.

It's a loss for the city.

She's someone who tries to understand.

Why hasn't, why hasn't the snow been plowed?

Why are there still huge piles of snow just outside?

That's what people read the post for.

Who, who are our teams trading?

What is the restaurant where it's not worth spending your money on a date night?

And what is the whole in the wall Korean place where you can get the best bibimbap?

That is the role the post serves for the community.

And all of that is just being torn away for no reason.

Staff writer for the Atlantic, Ashley Parker.

We're so grateful for you coming here today.

And talking about a newspaper, an institution.

Uh, that was such an important part of your life.

And let's hope that a new owner one day comes in.

And revives this great institution.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ashley's new piece is available to read online right now.

Mike Barnacle.

Um,

it's very easy for people to cynically say,

well, the era of great newspapers is gone.

The era where you the Barnacles.

The Roykos.

You know, all the the Will Bond.

I mean, all these great writers, reporters.

Very easy to say that era is gone.

But you look at some people who are still doing it right.

A.G. Sulzberger at the New York Times.

Joe Kahn.

And a lot of our friends at the Times.

Uh, they're still doing a hell of a job.

And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street.

And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

Fantastic paper.

A lot of people raised the raised the white flag.

Saying Murdoch's going to destroy the Wall Street Journal.

When Emma Tucker came in.

Like she came in and shook things up.

And there was, you know, sort of a semi-rebellion in there.

I will tell you.

And I don't know that Emma Tucker even knows who Nick Saban is.

So I don't know that.

But I could tell the second Nick Saban went to Alabama.

The culture's changed.

I will tell you when Emma Tucker took over the Wall Street Journal.

Even with the alerts I got.

I, I didn't even know she was there.

I just said, what's happening with the Wall Street Journal?

What's going on?

Wall Street Journal.

Mickey will tell you, I hate notifications.

I don't open them up.

She made me open them up.

And that paper is better than ever.

And she knows who Nick Saban is.

Same thing with the Atlantic.

Laurene Powell Jobs.

doing an extraordinary job there.

They're making money.

The Wall Street Journal's making money.

The Economist is making money.

The Financial Times is making money.

The New York Times doing better than ever.

You can still do this.

If you do it right.

Right, Mike?

Well, all those papers and the Atlantic, the magazines.

They're doing it right.

They're doing it as a role model for other papers that are struggling.

Listen, one of the problems in this country, I would submit, is the lack.

The death, the death of so many local newspapers.

Where people would get their news about what's happening in their state or their small town.

Or their city that they live in.

And there were a few papers still doing the job.

The Wall Street Journal, as you just mentioned, is a terrific paper.

I sat next to Emma Tucker at a at a dinner a couple of weeks ago.

And just listening to her, you can tell why it's a great paper.

Her leadership.

It's leadership.

The Times is spectacular.

Uh, my old paper, the Boston Globe is doing very well.

It's doing very well under the ownership of John W. Henry.

His wife Linda helps run the paper.

She does run the paper.

They have a brand new editor.

The old editor, Brian McGrory that they brought back in.

And it's a dominant newspaper.

And it can happen and it's important for the culture around the paper.

Around the cities that it covers.

But the death of the small papers from this in this country.

Are part of the slow diminution of people's appreciation of government, of democracy.

And we need more healthy newspapers.

But everything that you mentioned, especially the big three, the Washington Post.

Still there.

Still fighting.

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, still getting the job done.

The Atlantic magazine is spectacular magazine.

On a daily basis online.

They're all doing great jobs.

So there's still hope.

There's still hope.

There, there really is.

I will say also, just underlining very quickly.

The, the, the collapse of local newspapers.

Is devastating for good government.

I can tell you when I was in Congress, I didn't care what the New York Times.

Or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post had to say about me.

But when the, the, the person that that covered Gannett for Northwest Florida came around.

Yeah.

I, I was worried.

Because.

You know, they, that's, that's the paper that your mom and dad read.

That's the paper that your kids read.

That's the paper that your constituents read.

And local papers time and time again.

When I was up there, I think there were seven or eight local bureaus.

Washington bureaus out of Florida from newspapers.

Now, there probably is not one.

Maybe, maybe the Miami Herald or St. Petersburg.

Times.

But that's, that's not only bad for newspapers.

That's bad for American democracy and accountability.