“This is a really good business that we overshot on expense,” Stonesifer said at a companywide meeting. “And so we’re trying to right-size that to make sure we can plant the seeds and make the investments in the things that we need.”
About 700 of The Post’s roughly 2,500 employees received notices that they are eligible to take buyouts — but only about a third of those offered will be allowed to take them. Among the areas expected to be most affected are the Metro staff, where managers aim to trim a staff of 89 by nearly a quarter, including coverage areas such as education, transportation and social issues, according to people who attended smaller team meetings after Stonesifer’s announcement.
The buyout terms are more generous than packages offered in the 2000s, when The Post last underwent a major staff restructuring. At the high end, staffers who take a buyout after at least 15 years at The Post will receive two years of salary and a payment to cover a year of health insurance.
When Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, purchased The Post for $250 million in 2013, he ushered in a dramatic era of expansion at what, for many decades, was largely considered a regional newspaper. He pushed the paper’s leadership to position itself as a national and global news provider, and the newsroom staff swelled from about 580 to more than 1,000 today.
After the buyouts, the newsroom will probably have about 940 employees, roughly as many as it did at the end of 2021, according to a person familiar with the buyout discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information not previously made public.
There were indications about a year ago that The Post may have grown too large. Then-publisher and CEO Fred Ryan told employees in December that the company would eliminate a “single-digit percentage” of its 2,500-person workforce through layoffs in early 2023.
While the newsroom braced for as many as 100 layoffs, the company laid off only 20 newsroom employees and eliminated or froze 30 other positions.
This time, the company’s executives hope staffers will voluntarily choose to leave to avoid layoffs.
At a meeting with the Metro department Wednesday, executive editor Sally Buzbee pledged that The Post “remains committed to local journalism,” according to attendees.
“Of all the bad options, [buyouts seem] to be the least bad option,” said Katie Mettler, a local reporter who is co-chair of The Washington Post Newspaper Guild, a union for employees.
Yet she expressed concern that Metro has already borne the brunt of too many cutbacks over the years. “I don’t understand why Metro continues to carry the weight of a lot of these cuts, particularly since we have not been reinvested in since the last time we were cut down,” she said. “And I worry what signal that sends to readers who we are asking to pay for us and trust us.”
At the staff-wide meeting, Stonesifer said that while the company had broadly projected continued growth, it instead saw major declines across its business. The number of digital subscribers, currently 2.5 million, had dropped more than 15 percent since 2021, and the overall digital audience has declined by 28 percent over the same period.
The newspaper is set to lose $100 million this year, as first reported by the New York Times.
While readership surged during the Trump years, Stonesifer cited a drop-off in interest in politics after 2020 as one reason for The Post’s reduced audience.
“We knew we’d lose some folks with Trump, but … we thought we’d be able to hold onto them, that the quality of the work we were doing in other areas would hold them. It didn’t hold.”
While she said The Post “ran too hot on investments” under previous executives, she disagreed with an employee who claimed the company had “tanked” under Bezos’s ownership. Stonesifer, a member of Amazon’s board of directors and longtime friend of Bezos, took over from Ryan in June and is charged with finding his permanent replacement.
“Bezos trusts his leaders to lead, perhaps trusting longer than you would,” Stonesifer told employees.
Stonesifer said Bezos approved the buyouts “once we knew that plan was wrong,” and insisted that Bezos is open to spending more money on The Post once he hires a new publisher, likely by the end of the year, who can plan a broader strategy for the company.
“He’s fine with investment,” Stonesifer said, making reference to another Bezos side project, his Blue Origin aerospace company. “I mean, the man’s putting rockets up.”
