The Washington Post, once a flagship of legacy media and a reliable ally of the left, is now confronting staggering financial losses and a shrinking audience that underscore how badly the corporate press has misread the public.
According to Western Journal, a new report indicates the Post bled more than $100 million in 2025, compounding losses of about $100 million in 2024 and roughly $77 million in 2023, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The paper, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, responded earlier this month by announcing plans to cut about 30 percent of its staff, a drastic move that highlights the depth of the crisis.
In a presentation to newsroom employees this week, acting Chief Executive and Publisher Jeff DOnofrio attributed the red ink to a hiring binge that added hundreds of staffers before the downturn took hold. The Post has seen its number of news stories fall by 42 percent since 2020 even as costs climbed 16 percent over the same five-year span, a mismatch that would alarm any private-sector business.
DOnofrio told staff that leadership is working on a strategy to reverse the slide. Bear with me, because that will take some time and obvious care, but Im keen to get going on it, he said.
Signaling a more aggressive approach, he added that management intends to push hard for a turnaround. And we are going to go after it, and were going to go after it hard, because we owe it to this place to do that, he said.
Post executive editor Matt Murray conceded on Wednesday that the reality is that the Post had been facing some decline for quite some time, according to Fox News. During an interview with Semafor media editor Max Tani at the Restoring Trust in Media Summit in Washington, he added, The data really demonstrated that.
Murray acknowledged that subscriptions had begun to wane over the past five years, undermining the growth narrative that once surrounded the paper during the Trump years. He said the Post bulked up its staff during the COVID era, but when COVID faded and news consumption started to drop again, our costs [had] gone high, but our consumption went back down.
Murray recently put the Posts headcount at about 1,300 staffers, down sharply from the roughly 2,500 employees it reported in October 2023. He further admitted that morale has been a challenge at the Post for a while, a telling statement from the top editor of a newsroom that long portrayed itself as the arbiter of American democracy.
The paper has also conceded that its search traffic has been slashed by half over the past three years, while daily story output has dropped in tandem, a sign that readers are looking elsewhere for news and commentary. For many conservatives, the Posts financial free fall looks less like a mystery and more like the inevitable result of years of partisan coverage, hostility toward President Donald Trump, and a broader disconnect from the concerns of everyday Americans who are increasingly turning to alternative outlets for information and debate.
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