By Adam Pagnucco.
Last week’s layoffs at the Washington Post were a devastating blow to one of the most prominent media outlets in the nation as well as what once was the region’s publication of record. News entities including the New York Times, NPR, NBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and the Post itself estimated the layoffs as affecting roughly one-third of the Post’s workforce.
That may be an underestimate.
Former Post media reporter Paul Farhi, who left the paper in 2023, estimates that the layoffs applied to between 44% and 47.5% of the Post’s journalists. This is what he wrote on X on Sunday.
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For the record: It’s been widely reported that the @washingtonpost laid off the equivalent of a third of its newsroom last week. Terrible enough, but this appears to understate what happened.
Here’s the math, according to my convo today with @SarahKaplan48, a very fine Post reporter who is the steward of @postguild.
Sarah says nearly 300 *Guild-covered* employees were laid off on Wednesday, a figure that has been widely reported. But this doesn’t account for layoffs among Post journalists who aren’t covered by the Guild’s contract with the Post.
These include some of the journalists in the Post’s foreign bureaus, as well as editors and managers in Washington. Sarah didn’t have a specific number, but the figure is easily “dozens” more, she said.
The entire “news hub” in Seoul, for example, is being shut down, affecting more than a dozen people. About half of the Post’s foreign bureau network, built over decades, are being closed.
All told, it adds up to “well over” 300 people, per Sarah, or around 350-375 in total.
Given that the newsroom’s pre-layoff employment was 790 people, this reflects a purge of between 44 percent of the Post’s journalists at the low end and nearly HALF (47.5 percent) at the higher end.
Which is to say, the bloodbath was even bloodier than realized.