Desperate Washington Post Reporters Consider Begging Tom Hanks To Convince Jeff Bezos To Call Off Layoffs: Report

With significant job cuts looming at the Washington Post, employees are desperately trying to get the paper’s centibillionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, to step in and save their jobs. And they are reportedly considering trying to enlist Hollywood star Tom Hanks to help their cause.Journalists at the Post have been expecting job cuts for months, but this week, it was reported by multiple outlets that staffers expect the cuts to come in February. A former media reporter for the Post, Paul Farhi, posted on X that his former colleagues told him they believe that up to 300 people could lose their jobs across the newsroom and business side of the paper. He added that the cuts will “fall most heavily on sports and foreign staff.” Mr. Farhi says the Post’s “newsroom” (total number of journalists working for the publisher) now numbers around 650. At its peak, around 2020, the paper — which aggressively marketed itself as a locus of resistance to President Trump and experienced a surge in paid subscriptions — had more than 1,000 journalists working for it.But the Post’s big bet on anti-Trump programming appears to have been a miscalculation. Paid subscriptions plummeted during the interregnum and did not pick back up sufficiently once Mr. Trump returned to power. Mr. Bezos also changed his tune on Mr. Trump when the president was mounting his comeback. In 2017, he had supported the Post adopting the marketing phrase, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which was perceived as a response to the Trump Administration. But during the 2024 campaign, he barred the Post from publishing an editorial it had prepared endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. He then forced the liberal editorial section to become conservative, leading to the exits of many opinion staffers. Both moves by Mr. Bezos led to waves of subscription cancellations totalling a few hundred thousand.Perhaps more significantly, the Post spent its boom years focusing north and fancying itself as a rival to the New York Times, while its true competitor, Politico, was quietly replacing the Post as the premier chronicler of politics and government news. Now, in an attempt to stave off the job cuts for the paper — which lost around $100 million in 2024 — staffers have been tagging Mr. Bezos in posts on social media asking him to “Save The Post.” The foreign correspondents also sent a letter asking him to step in to save their jobs.They are also considering trying to enlist Hollywood stars in the campaign to save their jobs, a left-wing media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote in his Status newsletter.Mr. Darcy obtained internal Slack messages from Post staffers discussing ideas to “get Bezos’ attention and persuade him to deploy his vast resources to avert the coming newsroom amputation.”“According to internal Slack messages obtained by Status, staffers have been brainstorming for days about how to break through to the distracted owner. Ideas have ranged from direct appeals to reaching out to high-profile allies of The Post, including Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep,” Mr. Darcy reports. He noted Tom Hanks played legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee — who oversaw the coverage of the Watergate scandal — in the 2017 movie “The Post.”Besides Mr. Hanks’ role in “The Post,” the Hollywood star narrated a 2019 Super Bowl ad for the Post. Mr. Bezos also offered Mr. Hanks the opportunity to take a ride on one of his Blue Origin rockets — if he paid about $28 million. Mr. Darcy wrote that it was not clear whether the staff had actually made an attempt to reach Mr. Hanks. However, a Guild email urged staffers to try to get Mr. Bezos’s attention on social media — even by tagging his wife, Lauren Sanchez — to ensure that their plea for help “reaches those who need to hear it.”The Ukraine bureau chief, Siobhan O’Grady, wrote on X, “Hi @JeffBezos. We will never forget your support for our essential work documenting the war in Ukraine, which still rages. Your wife has called our team ‘badass beacons of hope.’ We risk our lives for the stories our readers demand. Please believe in us and #SaveThePost.”A global economics correspondent, David Lynch, wrote, “The @washingtonpost is one of the few remaining American newspapers with a robust foreign reporting staff. Eliminating it to save money would come at the cost of an informed citizenry, something that has never been more important. @JeffBezos #SaveThePost.”“@JeffBezos I cover international security for @washingtonpost and reported on ISIS, Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, al-Qaeda, Iran and Israel. I’ve been imprisoned, lived under threats, and escaped kidnappings to do this work. #Journalism matters to America and the world. #SaveThePost,” wrote an international security correspondent, Souad Mekhennet.Despite the desperate pleas for Mr. Bezos to ride to the rescue, staffers do not seem too optimistic that he will. Mr. Darcy wrote that some Post reporters told him they are “saddened” that the billionaire has apparently not responded to their petitions, as they noted that when he bought the paper in 2013, there were expectations he might use his fortune to provide a buffer for the paper financially. Mr. Darcy wrote, “As Bezos curries favor with Trump and jets around the world with Sánchez, these staffers are saddened that they have been met with silence and apparent indifference from the very owner who once hailed the important role journalism plays in the world.”A Post employee told Mr. Darcy, “To feel abandoned by someone who used to champion you is just wild.”“For the life of me, I don’t understand how someone sees something so successful, something with a clear path to make money with the right approach and leadership, and then just gives up on it. It’d be like if Blue Origin went to the moon and the space ship landed and Jeff said ‘never mind,’” another staffer said. In a Slack message, one employee quipped, “I was just thinking the other day that I wished MacKenzie [Scott] had gotten us in the divorce.”The Post has not commented on the reported cuts. Representatives for Mr. Bezos did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Desperate Washington Post Reporters Consider Begging Tom Hanks To Convince Jeff Bezos To Call Off Layoffs: Report

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