The Washington Post offered voluntary buyouts to its entire video and copy teams on Tuesday, according to an internal email that was obtained by the New York Times.
The paper also plans to offer what executive editor Matt Murray referred to as a Voluntary Separation Program (VSP) to members of the opinion team and any news employee with more than 10 years of tenure with the company, The Times reported. These details appear to be part of a more wide-reaching shakeup at the Jeff Bezos-owned publication.
In addition to the buyouts, the outlet will be restructuring their entire video team “to place much greater emphasis on developing repeatable franchises and more personality-driven formats for YouTube, other social media channels and off-platform more broadly,” Murray wrote.
Murray’s announcement will begin what is expected to be a two-month restructuring process that will wrap up in July. He further stressed that the buyouts are entirely voluntary.
The buyouts continue what has been a massive change in focus and direction for the paper over the last several months, which began when then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee resigned in June of last year.
Several tenured opinion columnists resigned from the paper following Trump’s election victory, while a number of layoffs were announced after Bezos announced plans to pull what has been a vehemently partisan outlet in a different direction.
“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Bezos wrote to employees ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Bezos tasked Murray with steering the shift, something he appears to have addressed directly in Tuesday’s email.
“[A]s stewards of this great institution, we all must remain relentlessly focused on bringing engaging and relevant journalism to growing numbers of readers in the formats and ways they want it in 2025,” Murray wrote, according to the New York Times. “That is an urgent and important task for us given the pace of technological change, the industry’s evolving landscape and the ever-present need to produce and promote strong, rigorous and independent journalism.”
The offer comes as The Washington Post seeks to recover from record-low readership numbers in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s November election victory. The Post had just 54 million unique visitors in 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal, down from 114 million in November of 2020 when Trump lost his reelection campaign.
