A new report says The Washington Post lost more than $100 million in 2025.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Post lost about $100 million in 2024 and about $77 million in 2023.
Earlier this month, the Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, announced it would lay off about 30 percent of its staff.
In a presentation to newsroom staff this week, acting Chief Executive and Publisher Jeff D’Onofrio blamed excess spending on hiring hundreds of staff members before the paper’s losses began, the report said.
The Washington Post lost more than $100 million last year, financial troubles that contributed to its decision to cut staff by 30% earlier this month (+deets about today’s newsroom meeting) https://t.co/ADrINYSoVW via @WSJ
— Alexandra Bruell (@alexbruell) February 26, 2026
The Post has seen its number of news stories decline by 42 percent since 2020, while in the ensuing five years, costs were up 16 percent.
D’Onofrio said there will be a plan to turn things around.
“Bear with me, because that will take some time and obvious care, but I’m keen to get going on it,” he said.
“And we are going to go after it, and we’re going to go after it hard, because we owe it to this place to do that,” he said.
Post executive editor Matt Murray said 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.”
The Post saw subscriptions “wane” over the past five years, he said.
Murray said the Post added staff during the pandemic, but “when COVID faded and news consumption started to drop again, our costs [had] gone high, but our consumption went back down.”
The Washington Post layoffs were way worse than we thought. Almost 1/2 the newsroom was wiped out. pic.twitter.com/raYGm1fZQm
— T. Christian Miller (@txtianmiller) February 10, 2026
Murray recently said the Post has about 1,300 staffers. In October 2023, it reported about 2,500 employees.
Murray noted that”morale has been a challenge at the Post for a while.”
The paper acknowledged that its search traffic has been cut in half over a three-year period. Daily story output had also dropped.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
