The Washington Post announced Wednesday that it would be getting rid of its sports section as part of mass layoffs of one-third of its staff across all departments.
Some sports reporters will move to other departments as the newspaper goes on with large-scale cutbacks. The Post currently has reporters on site covering Super Bowl LX in California and the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina.
Executive editor Matt Murray said the cuts would bring “stability”. However, the cuts were condemned by many of the paper’s employees, and some and some former leaders, one of whom described it as among the “darkest days in the history of” the newspaper.
“Today’s news is painful. These are difficult actions,” Murray wrote in a note to staff on Wednesday. “If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition.”
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Murray said in an explanation for the cuts that the paper’s online traffic had plummeted in the last three years amid the artificial intelligence boom, and that it was “too rooted in a different era”. “Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The elimination of the sports department was expected for a while, since word leaked out that the Post had told its sports staffers who had arranged to cover the Olympics that they would not be going.
Following this, the Post reversed course and said it would be sending a limited staff.
Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated.
The newspaper’s books department, and its Washington-area news department and editing staff will be restructured, Murray told staff members. Its Post Reports podcast will be suspended.
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The layoffs are the latest among a series of staff cuts and buyouts across The Post’s departments in recent years, amid backlash to some of the paper’s editorial decisions.
The newspaper lost tens of thousands of subscribers after it announced shortly before the 2024 presidential elections that it wouldn’t endorse a political candidate, a move made by its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. This move broke with years of tradition, with the paper having endorsed a candidate in most presidential elections since the 1970s – all of whom had been Democrats.
According to the BBC, Bezos’ move last year to focus the paper’s opinion section on “personal liberties and free markets” prompted the editor of that section to resign.
Washington’s Post’s financial issues and falling subscriber base stands in contrast to its competitor, The New York Times, which reported on Wednesday that it added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025.

