The veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has said he is “crushed” by the mass layoffs of hundreds of colleagues at the paper and said the impact would be felt by readers – noting both “deserve more”.
“I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” Woodward said in his first public remarks on the cuts, which were shared on X. “They deserve more.”
Woodward said the Post had produced “many superb and excellent groundbreaking stories” under executive editor Matt Murray. “There will be more,” Woodward said. “I will do everything in my power to help make sure the Washington Post thrives and survives.”
Woodward exposed the Watergate scandal with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein, ending Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974 and winning the Post the Pulitzer prize. Their book about the scandal, All the President’s Men, became a bestseller and was later turned into an Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
Woodward worked for the Post for decades, reporting on every presidency since. He now holds an honorific associate editor title.
His statement comes after the storied newspaper laid off about a third of its staff on Wednesday, or more than 300 journalists. The move has resulted in the shuttering of the paper’s sports department and the shredding of teams covering local news, style and the world – not to mention its audio and video departments, which had already been battered by previous cuts. Commercial teams were also cut.
“The aspirations of this news organization are diminished,” former editor Marty Baron told the Guardian. “I think that’ll translate into fewer subscribers. And I hope it’s not a death spiral, but I worry that it might be.”
The Post lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the fall of 2024 after owner Jeff Bezos abruptly shelved its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president days before the election won by Donald Trump. He also reoriented the paper’s opinion pages to a more narrow focus on supporting “personal liberties and free markets”.
At the time, Woodward and Bernstein decried Bezos’s decision to spike the planned Harris endorsement and end the paper’s history of endorsing presidential candidates as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”. They said in a joint statement that the move “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy”.
The Post, Woodward told the New Yorker on Wednesday, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”.
Upon Bezos’s 2013 acquisition of the paper, Woodward asked him why he had bought the Post. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway – financial runway – because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” Bezos said, according to the New Yorker. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
A day after announcing the decimation of the Washington Post, Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics in the coming year.