Washington Post plans to cut 240 jobs, offers voluntary buyouts: Report

Currently, The Washington Post has a total of 2,500 employees, and nearly 1,000 of them work in the newsroom.

The publication mentioned that it has been struggling to gain digital subscriptions.

Stonesifer also mentioned that the publication has been ‘overly optimistic’ about its growth in readership subscriptions and advertisements for the past two years.

While mentioning the expected planning of the company, Stonesifer said, “Our prior projections for traffic, subscriptions and advertising growth for the past two years – and into 2024 – have been overly optimistic.”

She added, “The urgent need to invest in our top growth priorities brought us to the difficult conclusion that we need to adjust our cost structure now.”

This is going to be the second such layoff and a much larger number at The Washington Post this year. Previously, in January the company laid off 50 employees after shutting down its Sunday Magazine.

Meanwhile, the present buyouts have come less than two months after the company quietly laid off seven people from ArcXP which is a tech division of cloud-based publishing software. Previously, the New York Times reported in July that The Washington Post was on track to ‘lose about $100 million in 2023’.

The media industry in the United States has witnessed record layoffs this year. Reportedly, at least 17,436 jobs were lost by the end of June. News outlets such as Vox Media, NPR and the Los Angeles Times announced to significantly reduce their workforces in 2023, while BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company, shut down its entire news division which also impacted a significant number of employees.