The Washington Post didn't just trim its newsroom. It carved out nearly half of it.
Updated figures now place the Post's layoffs between 350 and 375 journalists — not the roughly 300 that early reports suggested. That initial number was already staggering. The revised one is something else entirely.
Guild steward and Post Metro reporter Sarah Kaplan, as reported by the Washingtonian, provided the fuller accounting after days of piecing together the actual scope of the cuts:
"the paper is dropping between 350 and 375 journalists"
The reason earlier numbers fell short? Post employees were informed individually that their jobs had been eliminated, and the initial tally only captured union-covered staff. As the Washingtonian reported:
"Previous reports said that nearly 300 union members were among those laid off last week. That figure did not account for dozens more layoffs among Post journalists who aren't covered by the Guild's contract, including staffers in its foreign bureaus and editors and managers in Washington."
So the foreign bureau reporters and the editors and managers outside the Guild's umbrella were quietly disappearing from the ledger while the press ran with a number that already sounded catastrophic.
The Post's pre-layoff newsroom stood at 790 people. Losing 350 to 375 of them means somewhere between 44 percent and 47.5 percent of the entire newsroom is gone, according to Breitbart News.
Not a quarter. Not a third — which is where early reports pegged it. Nearly half.
People were already calling the initial round one of the biggest bloodbaths in media history when they thought it was around 300. The reality is measurably worse. And because employees were notified one by one rather than in a single announcement, it took Kaplan and the Guild several days just to assemble a coherent picture of the damage.
That piecemeal approach — whether intentional or not — had the convenient effect of keeping the full scale of the collapse out of the initial news cycle.
There's a temptation to treat this as a simple business story. Advertising revenue down, digital subscriptions plateauing, billionaire owner finally pulling the ripcord. And those factors are real.
But they don't explain why nearly half a newsroom vanished. Plenty of publications face financial headwinds without amputating half their editorial staff in a single stroke. What makes the Post's situation distinctive is that it spent years burning through the one asset that was supposed to justify its existence: credibility.
The Post branded itself as the indispensable check on power — "Democracy Dies in Darkness" stamped right there on the masthead. But the paper increasingly operated less as a news organization and more as an advocacy shop with a printing press. Readers noticed. Subscribers made choices. And now 350-plus journalists are paying the price for an editorial culture that confused activism with journalism.
That's the part the industry postmortems will skip. They'll talk about the "challenging media landscape" and "digital transformation." They won't talk about what happens when a legacy institution decides its job is to tell readers what to think rather than what happened.
The Post isn't dying in isolation. Legacy media outlets across the board are hemorrhaging staff, influence, and audience. The common thread isn't technology or generational shifts in media consumption — those are accelerants, not causes. The common thread is that institutional media decided to cater to a narrow ideological audience and then discovered that audience wasn't large enough to sustain the operation.
Conservative audiences left first. Then moderates. Then, even some liberals who simply wanted straight reporting grew tired of being lectured. What remains is a shrinking base that already agrees with every editorial premise baked into every "news" story — and that base doesn't generate enough revenue to keep 790 journalists employed.
So now it's 415. Maybe fewer, once the next round hits.
The Post will likely attempt to rebrand whatever emerges from this gutting as a leaner, more focused operation. Expect language about "prioritizing digital" and "investing in core strengths." That's what every media company says when it's contracting.
But a newsroom cut by nearly half isn't pivoting. It's surviving. And the journalists who remain will work under the shadow of knowing that their institution's choices — editorial and financial — led directly to the elimination of their colleagues' livelihoods.
Seven hundred and ninety people walked into that newsroom. Fewer than half still have a desk.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. Newspapers die in self-delusion.
