The Washington Post is retreating from Silicon Valley when it matters most

Proclaiming that we live in a tech-centric society understates its saturation. 

Software, specifically machine learning and AI, coupled with advanced manufacturing has delivered technology to street corners, schools, offices, factories, and even farm fields. This tech, much of it created in Silicon Valley, sits on your wrist, is carried in your pocket, integrated in the movies you watch, and maybe in the music you listen to. And it is certainly the means in which that Amazon package was ordered, sorted, and delivered to your doorstep. 

It has turned its founders, executives, and middle managers into king-like figures, whose wealth and political influence mirrors the Gilded Age. Seven of the top 10 richest people in the world can tie their wealth directly to tech. Amazon co-founder, chairman, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is third, behind just Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, according to Forbes, which tracks wealth and the people who have it. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer round out the list.

And in this moment, the Bezos-owned Washington Post has gutted its coverage of them and the tech industry at large as part of a sweeping set of layoffs that affected more than 300 people. The team that includes tech, science, health and business was cut by more than half from 80 to 33 people, according to tech reporter Drew Harwell. The tech desk alone cut 14 people. Its San Francisco bureau is a shell.

Among those affected include reporters covering Amazon, artificial intelligence, internet culture, and investigations. The newspaper also laid off staff covering the media industry (which had previously reported on Bezos’ ownership over their own paper). 

The Post cut its entire sports bureau and nearly annihilated its foreign reporting teams, including its Middle East desk, and reporters and their editors covering Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others. It closed its Books section, decimated coverage of culture and the DC Metro area, and laid off all reporters and editors covering race and ethnicity issues nationally. 

The coverage of tech isn’t more important than social, economic, and geopolitical issues. But never before have the people exerting outsized influence on the world’s geopolitics and economy also been so directly responsible for stemming the global flow of information about it.

The world centers on tech and is tied to the GDP growth — or retreat — of its superpowers. Tech’s most powerful executives are asking the public to place their attention elsewhere.

The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray couched the layoffs as a reboot of sorts aimed at reaching readers and eventually profitability, according to the New York Times, which included comments he made to staff. 

“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive, and complicated media landscape,” he reportedly said during a Zoom meeting with staff.

It’s no secret The Post has lost money and subscribers in recent years, in some cases due to policies crafted or backed by Bezos. For instance, his directive to end presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, axing a drafted piece backing Kamala Harris, reportedly led to “hundreds of thousands” of canceled subscriptions, per NYT. It reportedly suffered $100 million in losses in 2024, in part because of the cancellations.

Its web traffic has also declined. Semafor reported that daily visits were down to around 3 million by the middle of 2024, from 22.5 million in January 2021.  

The Post cut its staff from 1,000 to under 800 last spring, with CEO Will Lewis calling out the $100 million loss from the previous year.

The layoffs at The Post, of course, don’t exist in a vacuum. (The media industry, and not just legacy players, has been plagued by a fragmented audience and changes to Google Search algorithms that have directed readers away from news outlets and towards its own AI generated answers.)

The size, scope, and location of those hatchet strikes merit scrutiny, however. Particularly considering the shift in media ownership over the past 15 years. 

Bezos’ acquisition of the Post in 2013 for $250 million was met with a mix of skepticism and hope, by weary journalists who had experienced consolidation, layoffs, and the growing pains of moving from a print-only to digital-dominant media industry. 

His acquisition became part of a broader trend at the time in which billionaires, many with backgrounds in tech, snapped up beleaguered media organizations well worn from the previous go public-private equity cycle. 

A few years after Bezos bought The Post, Laurene Powell Jobs made her purchase of The Atlantic, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Time Inc., and pharmaceutical executive Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times. 

Bezos, like Benioff and Soon-Shiong (who also blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris), moved closer to Trump after he won the 2024 election. His spaceflight company Blue Origin relies on federal contracts, and Amazon had faced increased scrutiny under previous administrations.

Lewis was reportedly not present to oversee the staff cuts and changes at The Post (Murray told Fox News that the CEO “had a lot of things to tend to today”). Nor was Bezos. As his newspaper prepared to cut one-third of its staff, Bezos spent Monday with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in Florida, leading him on a tour of Blue Origin’s facilities. 

Less than 48 hours later, The Washington Post would lay off the journalist who reported on Blue Origin.

The darkness, it seems, is creeping in.