--- title: Post mortem description: The cuts at the Washington Post have been a long time coming --- [![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) [![logo (3)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(3).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) - [Home](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/en-gb/) - [Advisory](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/advisory) - [121 Consulting](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/121-consulting) - [Content Review](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contentreview) - [Testimonials](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/testimonial) - [Contact](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contact-us) # Post mortem [Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter) 06 February 2026 7 min read **The cuts at the Washington Post have been a long time coming** “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens” – Bobby Bacala, The Sopranos I have been a reader of the Washington Post for decades and more recently a subscriber, first taking advantage of their amazing $60 a year deal for foreign subscribers and latterly through Apple News (which despite the worst UX in news remains the best value subscription I have). I have admired the Post’s journalism and its journalists. I also used to work with a number of people who are now on the business side there and hold them in high regard. They are smart people who understand the changeable tides that are washing over our industry. So I find myself caught in different minds about the current situation at the Post after nearly a third of the editorial staff were let go this week. Of course I have the greatest sympathy for those who have lost their jobs. I’ve been there. It’s a gut punch and they are understandably worried about what the future holds for them. Many will see this as an unfair way to end years of garlanded service. I acknowledge these emotions but want to step back a bit to take a broader view. For this email, I used as an epigraph a line from The Sopranos where the mobster is musing on what it’s like to get whacked. It is ironic in its original use and in this case too, because of course you do hear it coming, and if you don’t, you should, and try to take preventative action. The cutbacks at the Washington Post weren’t the result of something that happened recently. These kinds of desperate measures have been brewing for years, maybe decades, as they have across the news industry. There is a reason Press Gazette runs a [rolling update](https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/journalism-job-cuts-in-2026-updates/) on redundancies from former newspapers and not for situations vacant. We are in a period of profound structural change as the effects of digital distribution have multiplied over the past two decades. From the perspective of Europe, and particularly London, it feels remarkable that it took so long to affect the big beasts of American journalism, which have perhaps been insulated from reality by the huge size and wealth of their market. In the UK, newspapers here have been retrenching from their maximalist print newsrooms for many years, but by and large they have done so incrementally over the long term. At The Times this process was managed over a period of 15 years with small cuts every year, not all at once. The British papers are also now tacitly, if not openly, focused on particular niches (as the Post is now trying to do). At the highest level, The Telegraph has swung politically more to the right as the Guardian has moved leftwards, both targeting those audiences to the exclusion of others; the Mail is majoring on entertainment coverage; while The Times’s energies are focused on the radio station that bears its name. It feels like they have recognised, as the Post has belatedly done, that being a general interest newspaper is a difficult trick to pull off in the age of the internet. Someone with greater knowledge of and/or more focus on any one subject is always just a click away. Digitally native users, who are rapidly becoming the majority, will naturally shop around to find reporting or a point of view that they find valuable. The blame for this week’s layoffs should fall as much on previous as on present newsroom leadership and management. The latter clearly didn’t want to fire a third of the newsroom. Who would? If they had a choice clearly they wouldn’t have done it, though I feel it could have been handled better. Previous management perhaps hung too much on the power of “great journalism” and their rollcall of Pulitzer Prize winners. Turns out we might have misjudged just how valuable audiences regard either of those things. They didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining during the first Trump bump in subscriptions. Instead they went on a hiring spree, apparently thinking they could defy gravity. And on the subject of Jeff Bezos: the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris hit hard, but frankly if you expect billionaires to fund your losses in perpetuity then history suggests you will ultimately be disappointed. That’s not how they become or stay billionaires. There are lessons here for every publisher as we face up to the next threat in the form of AI-powered content interfaces. First, be clear eyed about the actual value of your journalism to your users. Second, never for one second assume that you have some special force field that will make you immune to the world around you. Third, act now – don’t put off difficult decisions. As Will Lewis and his team at the Post are discovering, that only makes it worse. ## Next blog post ## [We have the ideas – show us some action](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/we-have-the-ideas-show-us-some-action) [Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/we-have-the-ideas-show-us-some-action) ![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg) Hunter Brunt Media Ltd. 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