USC journalists react to mass Washington Post layoffs

The Washington Post announced massive newsroom layoffs on Feb. 4, shedding about 30% of its workforce, according to the New York Times.

Owned by the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, the company announced it would be going through a “broad strategic reset,” according to Entrepreneur.

The Post’s layoffs include a massive shrinking of the metro section, as well as the abolishment of its books desk and its entire sports section. A number of overseas journalists affiliated with the Post were also laid off, according to Associated Press.

The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a memo to the Post staff that after long deliberations, the Washington Post leadership had “concluded that the company’s structure was too rooted in a different era.”

To some in the news industry, the layoffs weren’t surprising.

Daniel Durbin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the media industry has always been an environment where reporters “adapt or die.”

“The [Washington Post layoffs] really follow a long string of layoffs that go back at least 15 years,” Durbin said.

Durbin said he believes Bezos’ primary interest has consistently been profitability rather than journalism itself, explaining the scale and bluntness of the layoffs.

When a newsroom is treated primarily as a business unit rather than a public institution, he added, cost-cutting becomes the default response to declining revenue rather than reinvestment or experimentation.

“You have an owner who is not really a journalist or so interested in journalism, but somebody who’s demonstrated again and again and again that his interest is in making money,” Durbin said.

Katie Havens, a senior journalism major, said she was also unsurprised by the layoffs.

“I think it’s not surprising that [the layoffs] happened,” she said. “I think a third of their staff [being laid off] is a lot, but I guess it was heading there.”

The Post caused controversy during the 2024 elections after its editorial team declined to endorse a presidential candidate and subsequently lost a quarter million of their subscribers, according to The Guardian.

They also lost an additional 70,000 subscribers in the spring of 2025 after doing a smaller round of layoffs.

“The Washington Post has long been a very conservative newspaper, not politically, but in terms of their practice,” Durbin said. “They’ve been very old school journalism, very consistent over time. They’re still, to some degree, living on the fumes of Woodward and Bernstein.”

Despite the Post’s major media legacy, it is not immune to transitional periods.

“Nobody’s too big to die,” Durbin said. “Nobody’s too big to fail. If they don’t transition [to the digital age] successfully, they will eventually fail.”

Readers have fundamentally changed how they consume news because of evolving technology. Over half of U.S. adults now report that they get their news from social media at least some of the time, according to a study by Pew Research Center.

“You have shorter and shorter attention spans from readers — more and more people being influenced by sudden hit information or visuals on TikTok and other places like that,” Durbin said. “When people are not willing to go past two sentences, the lengthy editorial just disappears from people’s radar.”

Havens said she has seen a rise in social media from her own media consumption.

“People are reading articles less and less,” she said. “I think that the media has definitely changed a lot, and journalists are trying to figure out how to attract a following.”

Laura Davis, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former deputy mobile editor at the L.A. Times, said Wednesday was a “sad day” for friends and former students at the Post affected by the cuts.

“Even if they weren’t laid off, it was devastating,” she said.

Yet, Davis remains optimistic about the future of journalism.

“I think a lot of the bright spots in news right now are actually in local media and local newsrooms,” she said. “Even though it is a hard day, I remain hopeful.”