Washington Post Set to Lay Off Hundreds of Employees

They'll be completely closing down "almost the entire" sports desk. Which struck me as strange -- isn't sports a low-cost but popular section of the paper?

I guess there are now so many internet sports outlets that no one cares about what a stinky old liberal thought about the latest "Commanders" game.

The Washington Post announced on Wednesday that it is laying off hundreds of its employees, which marks one of the newspaper's deepest workforce cuts in its history.

This development is part of a broader trend as legacy media outlets are rapidly losing viewers and readers.

From CNN:

Executive Editor Matt Murray and human resources chief Wayne Connell sent an email to staffers Wednesday morning instructing employees to "stay home today" but attend an 8:30 a.m. ET meeting via Zoom during which the Washington Post's leadership will announce "significant actions across the company."

Those actions include shutting down almost the entire Sports section, closing the Books section and cancelling the daily Post Reports podcast, sources at the newspaper said.

One of the most severe cuts comes in the form of a "restructuring" of the Post's Metro desk, which covers D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

Papers like the NY Times and Washington Post were criticized for years for not sufficiently covering the cities in which they were based. All they cared about was national politics. I guess the Washington Post is now acknowledging they don't really cover Washington so they'll save a buck by ending the pretense that they do.

But maybe I'm reading this wrong. Ed Morrissey thinks they're restructuring in the exact opposite direction, focusing more on local coverage and ending the competition with the NY Times to be the national liberal daily "news" paper. Maybe I missed something.

The paper will also be drastically chopping its budget for international reporting.

As opposed to sports, international coverage is very expensive. Even when they rely almost exclusively on foreign "stringers" who are not-so-secretly part of the Hamas terrorist organization.

The cuts are required because the #Resistance leftists at the Post have shed one half of the former audience, and the paper loses almost $100 million a year. That's practically Stephen Colbert level losses!

...

When Jeff Bezos first acquired The Washington Post in 2013, he expanded operations and invested heavily in the outlet. But recent years have seen drastic financial losses, a severe increase in subscriber cancellations, and a mass exodus of top talent.

Ed Morrissey writes that the new leadership has been warning the #Resistance lefties at the paper that Winter Is Coming for two years:

Lewis warned in response that he wasn't going to stick with the plan that involved losing $77 million a year to float a vanity project for progressive activists:

At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. "We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can't sugarcoat it anymore," Lewis said. "So I've had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best."

Part of this is just the fact that traditional media is entering the hospice phase. For whatever reason, people are just out of the habit of reading these legacy newspapers. (Or seeing movies in legacy theaters.)

Another factor is that the specific politics being pushed by the Washington Post's #Resistance lefties. It's not that #Resistance leftist politics don't have a market. They do. One third of the country are, alas, woke communist psychopathic nihilists. You should be able to sell a paper appealing to this lunatic cohort.

The trouble is, every media outlet, pretty much, panders to this same lunatic cohort. They're all reading from the same depraved Marxist prayer book.

Plus, what #Resistance leftists are selling is not at all a difficult product to produce. They've shifted from reporting on news, which does take some time and effort, and which is something people will pay for, to just ranting endlessly that Bad Orange Man Is Getting More Orange and More Bad and shrieking the same six propaganda slogans forever.

You don't need an organization that spends $300 million on salaries and rent to do this. Any deranged leftwing imbecile with a $500 camera can do this from their basement. And they're almost all doing it -- so what does any lefty need the lefty press for?

The religion has just as many preachers as adherents. That's too many. Some will need to leave the poisonous church of Marxism and find work that's actually productive.

I can't imagine what that might end up being, but I'm sure they must be good at something.

Right? Right?

Hello everyone! I got decent sleep, not great but decent, so I won't be whining as much today. I hope you're all doing great.

I got my humidifier out of the garage and cleaned it but apparently it broke so I'm waiting for Amazon to send me my next one.

posted by Ace at 12:30 PM

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