Washington Post will offer buyouts to cut staff by 240

The Post currently employs about 2,500 people across the entire company. A staff meeting is planned for 10 a.m. Wednesday to discuss the buyouts, which will be offered to employees in specific jobs and departments.

“The urgent need to invest in our top growth priorities brought us to the difficult conclusion that we need to adjust our cost structure now,” Stonesifer wrote.

Stonesifer added that the buyouts are being offered in hopes of “averting more difficult actions such as layoffs — a situation we are united in trying to avoid.”

In a statement, company spokeswoman Kathy Baird said the buyouts should put The Post “in a strong place for 2024 and beyond,” though “this decision is still difficult knowing some of our valued colleagues may choose to leave at the end of the year.”

The steep cuts at The Post come as the newspaper is set to lose $100 million this year, as first reported by the New York Times.

This announcement — which caught staffers off guard — comes about nine months after The Post reduced its newsroom staff by 50 positions, including 20 layoffs.

At that time, the company said that, by the end of 2023, the overall newsroom staff would be the same size if not larger than before the layoffs, thanks to a continued rapid pace of hiring. Then-publisher Fred Ryan said that The Post would continue to expand in certain high-priority coverage areas but that it “cannot keep investing resources in initiatives that do not meet our customers’ needs.”

The announcement Tuesday is reminiscent of the way The Post handled staff reductions in a bygone era, through the rounds of voluntary buyouts that became a hallmark of the years before Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Post in 2013.

The Post has largely avoided mass staff reductions since then, although it did shutter its daily free commuter newspaper and its stand-alone magazine.

Many other media companies have slashed their staffs in the past couple of years as advertising revenue and readership numbers have dropped. CNN laid off hundreds of employees in December, Vox Media laid off 7 percent of its 1,900-person workforce in January, and the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, has gone through several rounds of layoffs.

This is one of the most dramatic business decisions made by Stonesifer, who became interim CEO earlier this year after Ryan left the company. A director on Amazon’s board and a longtime friend of Bezos, Stonesifer came into the job with a mandate from The Post owner to ensure a smooth transition for the company.

She has insisted that she will not remain in the role permanently and that among her main duties was hiring a permanent publisher and CEO. “Just ensuring the team and the culture are in place for the decade ahead is really the number one goal,” she said in June.

Stonesifer has generally received a warm reception from staffers, in contrast to Ryan’s tensions with the newsroom over the layoffs near the end of his tenure.