The Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray spoke out Wednesday after massive layoffs recently rocked the outlet.
“I’d say the reality is that the Post had been facing some decline for quite some time,” Murray told Semafor media editor Max Tani at the Restoring Trust in Media Summit in Washington, D.C. “The data really demonstrated that.”
Murray added that the Post had been on a five-year trajectory of “losing revenues” and seeing subscriptions “wane.”
He said the outlet invested in editing resources and “some areas of coverage” during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to adjust to the “new level of normal.”
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Murray said, “When COVID faded and news consumption started to drop again, our costs [had] gone high, but our consumption went back down.”
“We made very smart choices,” he continued. “Standing still would not have been an option.”
In order to “break even,” Murray said, “our owners contributed to a long-term future for the post.”
“We don’t have to be a gigantic profit center,” he added. “We are on a trajectory to be able to break even.”
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At a recent Post employee town hall, one week after the paper underwent a brutal round of layoffs, Murray said roughly 1,300 total staffers remained, according to The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr, a former Post media reporter.
In October 2023, the Post reported it had employed “about 2,500 people across the entire company.”
Speaking with Fox News Digital, Murray acknowledged “morale has been a challenge at the Post for a while.”
“The Post has been dealing with different kinds of problems for some number of years now,” he said. “We want to be in a different period [after] this painful exercise, and that’s a period of collaboration, growth, innovation and reinventing the place for the future.”
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The paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, has also taken heat as critics accuse him of being disinterested in saving the paper he bought more than a decade ago.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
Washington Post editor acknowledges concern over possible ‘death spiral’ at newspaper after major layoffs
