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DAILY BEAST

Jeff Bezos’ ‘Washington Post’ Gives Up Promoting Journalism and Fires PRs
Corbin Bolies
Tue, January 7, 2025


Paul Ellis/Pool/Getty Images

The Washington Post laid off nearly its entire public relations department in its sweeping layoffs on Tuesday as it moves away from promoting the paper’s journalism.

The Post laid off six staffers from the company’s public relations department, leaving it with four managers. Kathleen Floyd, a senior publicist at the Post and co-chair of its union, said she and team were told the paper was “no longer promoting the journalism” and would focus “entirely on talent promotion” during a Zoom call on Tuesday morning.

“It’s almost unconscionable that the decision of our leadership would lead to an impact on us,” she said. “It’s not the day-to-day employees’ fault the we lost more than 250,000 subscribers.”

Kathy Baird, the Post‘s chief communications officer, confirmed in a memo to staffers the paper “will stop the dedicated practice of publicity for our journalism across broadcast and traditional media outlets” in service of a new “Star Talent Unit.”

“We need our journalism to be accessed at an even greater rate and we no longer believe traditional outreach is the way to get us there,” Baird wrote.

The layoffs were parts of dozens of cuts on Tuesday in the latest blow to the paper’s stature. The pink slips were spread throughout the business side, affecting about 4 percent of the paper’s total staff, the paper confirmed. No one from the Post newsroom was cut.

“The Washington Post is continuing its transformation to meet the needs of the industry, build a more sustainable future and reach audiences where they are,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Changes across our business functions are all in service of our greater goal to best position The Post for the future.”

The layoffs primarily affected the Post‘s advertising department, which saw 73 people let go. The advertising department will restructure, chief advertising officer Johanna Mayer-Jones told staffers in a memo obtained by The New York Times. Advertising remains the Post‘s primary source of revenue, she wrote.

“Change is never easy, but it is essential for our future,” she wrote.

The layoffs came months after owner Jeff Bezos killed its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and caused more than 300,000 people to cancel their subscriptions, throwing the cash-strapped paper into further financial distress. It was already set to lose $77 million before Bezos pulled the plug on the endorsement, according to New York magazine.

Tuesday’s news dug morale at the beleaguered newsroom deeper into the ground, staffers told the Daily Beast. The paper has already seen nearly 10 staffers leave for competitors just in the last week, and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after a cartoon criticizing Bezos and other tech billionaires was killed.

The Post still does not have a permanent editorial leader, and its CEO Will Lewis—who next week faces allegations over a phone-hacking cover-up scandal in the U.K.—remains out of sight for most staffers.

“Everyone’s just dejected,“ a Post journalist told the Daily Beast. “No one really knows why Lewis still has a job, and no one knows why Bezos is running things this way—or why he’s holding onto the paper at this point."

The Post Guild said in an email to its members, obtained by the Daily Beast, that it was “deeply saddened and concerned” by the layoffs.

“This is a really, really hard time, coming after a really hard time, which came after a really hard time at the company,” its leadership wrote to staffers.

The Post has gone through waves of job cuts for more than two years. It let 240 people go across both the newsroom and business side in 2023 through buyouts, and it laid off a quarter of staff from its software company Arc XP last year.