Amazon founder Jeff Bezos-owned media house,
The Washington Post, is planning to cut nearly 240 jobs, which is around 10% of its workforce, by offering voluntary buyouts.
The leading US publication is planning to cut jobs to offset challenges with digital subscriptions and advertising, The New York Times reported citing a company-wide email sent on October 10.
In the email, interim chief executive officer Patty Stonesifer said that the company hoped to achieve the cuts through voluntary buyouts, which will be offered to staff members this week.
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.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
