New year, more troubles: Washington Post enters 2024 plagued with financial woes, criticism

2023 was a rough year for The Washington Post and 2024 is not looking much brighter for the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper. 

The Post finished last year by implementing forced buyouts as part of its extensive workforce reduction goal to prevent layoffs. Roughly 240 staffers reportedly took the buyouts, which followed a bitter strike that erupted among aggrieved employees.

That led to the exit of many beloved newsroom “Posties” – what Post staffers refer to themselves — including columnist Greg Sargent and senior editor Marc Fisher, who had been with the Post for 35 years.

“The decision to offer voluntary packages to employees across the organization was designed in hopes of averting more difficult actions such as layoffs – a situation we were united in trying to avoid,” a Washington Post spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital.

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Vanity Fair reported that the newsroom has been “rattled” by the buyouts, particularly the ones impacting the paper’s research department, so much so that some of The Post’s star reporters sent a letter to executive editor Sally Buzbee and new publisher and CEO Will Lewis urging them to bring back two senior researchers Magda Jean-Louis and Alice Crites, both who had taken buyouts but were crucial to their reporting. 

“We are eager to start off 2024 with a renewed sense of purpose and feel it will put us at a considerable disadvantage if our news research department is in such a diminished state,” the letter to Buzbee and Lewis read, according to Vanity Fair.

Buzbee told Vanity Fair, “The Post has a long history of holding power to account and we adhere to that legacy every day, including in times of transition. Right now, we’re committed to fulfilling that mission and to building a newsroom of the future.”

One longtime Post insider didn’t sound as positive about the buyouts telling Fox News Digital, “People are very upset at how badly the process was handled. I went through many rounds of pre-Bezos buyouts and though some people were discreetly targeted in those rounds, the very public decimation of some units this time has been very demoralizing.”

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“People will move on. They were clearing the decks for Will Lewis, but it will leave a sour taste for his tenure for a while,” the veteran staffer added.  

Another discouraging sign was the recent exit of its chief revenue officer Alex MacCallum, who had been on the job for less than six months. 

It was previously reported that the Post was set to lose a whopping $100 million in 2023. New reporting is shedding light on what’s behind the devastating loss. According to Puck News, its traffic dropped “more than 50% from 2020” resulting in “less than 60 million monthly uniques.” And of those, “less than one in 500” are paid subscribers. 

It’s not just financial woes that are plaguing the Post. 

The liberal paper’s coverage of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war was called out last week by Jewish Insider, running the headline “Washington Post under fire for repeated anti-Israel bias, systemic sloppiness in Middle East coverage.”

Jewish Insider’s scathing report came on the heels of a lengthy correction that was made on a month-old news story, admitting it had “mischaracterized” some aspects of its story about Palestinian mothers being separated from their babies during the war. 

The Nov. 17 article, “Israel’s war with Hamas separates Palestinian babies from their mothers,” described how Israel gave mothers with high-risk pregnancies from Gaza a special permit to travel to Israel to receive potentially life-saving treatment for themselves and their babies. The previous version of the story stated that Israeli rules forced all mothers to travel back to Gaza to renew their permits if their newborns stayed in the hospital for longer than a few weeks.

A correction posted Dec. 28 clarified that it was actually hospital officials who had relayed this incorrect information to two Palestinian mothers. The Post editor’s note also confessed it had failed to ask for comment from Israeli officials for the article, which “fell short” of its “standards for fairness.”

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Jewish Insider pointed out that the Post took weeks to correct the story despite alleged internal backlash, though a second Post insider pushed back at the claim that the backlash was “internal,” telling Fox News Digital, “All the criticism was from outside.”

The Post insider said they heard “zero” internal complaining or criticism related to coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. They added one of the paper’s Israel correspondents effectively rolled their eyes when they learned the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) was behind some of the external attacks.

But Jewish Insider put a spotlight on the paper’s mistakes. 

“It is unclear why the editor’s note took more than a month to produce. Before it was appended to the top of the article during the holiday break last week, the story had raised eyebrows among some Post staffers who privately expressed reservations that it did not meet the newspaper’s rigorous editorial standards, according to a source familiar with the matter,” Jewish Insider reporter Matthew Kassel wrote before noting other corrections. 

“In addition to the story on Palestinian infants, at least two other articles authored by its lead reporter, Louisa Loveluck, have drawn significant corrections in recent weeks, raising questions about the paper’s commitment to accurate and balanced coverage of the evolving war between Israel and Hamas,” Kassel continued. “The paper has also faced accusations that its Middle East coverage has veered into activism.” 

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Kassel accused the Post of “presenting a one-sided picture of the conflict” and noted that the paper has appeared skeptical of the determination that Hamas used the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command center.

“To some readers who have taken issue with the Post’s coverage, its skepticism of U.S. and Israeli intelligence findings has been especially troubling because, according to critics, the newspaper has otherwise continued to uncritically cite Palestinian casualty figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry — which reporters have habitually refrained from identifying as a Hamas-controlled agency. The newspaper has also been accused of amplifying unverified claims from Hamas’ media office,” Jewish Insider wrote. 

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Fox News’ Brian Flood and David Rutz contributed to this report.