Washington (United States) (AFP) - The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced major job cuts Wednesday, saying that “painful” restructuring was needed at the storied newspaper.

The Post, which gained legendary status when it helped bring down president Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, will see “substantial” reductions in its newsroom, which until now had an estimated 800 journalists, Executive Editor Matt Murray said.

The shrinking of the Post comes as major traditional media outlets in the United States face intense pressure from President Donald Trump, who routinely denigrates journalists as “fake news” and has launched multiple lawsuits over coverage of his presidency.

Bezos, one of the world’s richest people, has become close to Trump in the Republican’s second term. His Amazon behemoth controversially paid Trump’s wife, First Lady Melania Trump, a reported $40 million for a documentary on her this year, along with another $35 million for marketing.

Murray said the shifts at the Post reflect the radically changing economy for the news media.

This “will help to secure our future… and provide us stability moving forward,” Murray said in a note to employees.

He cited changes to the news ecosystem, from individuals who “generate impact at low cost” to AI-generated content, as well as financial challenges that have already produced rounds of cost-cutting and buyouts at the Post.

“The company’s structure is too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product,” he said. “And even as we produce much excellent work, we too often wrote from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.”

- War zone layoff -

Claire Parker, the Cairo bureau chief for the Post, said on X that she had been laid off “along with the entire roster of Middle East correspondents and our editors.”

The Kyiv-based Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, was not spared. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I’m devastated,” she posted on X.

A member of The Washington Post’s graphics team told AFP it had been reduced from 25 people to nine. Sports and local news departments are being sharply scaled back and the paper’s daily podcast, Post Reports, is being dropped, local media reported.

“These layoffs are not inevitable. A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach and its future,” the labor union representing many Post journalists said in a statement slamming the job cuts.

It called for supporters of the paper, acquired by Bezos in 2013, to rally outside its Washington headquarters at noon on Thursday.

- ‘Darkest days’ -

The White House’s communications director, Stephen Cheung, issued a typically scornful message.

“Just a reminder that printing fake news is not a profitable business model,” he posted on X.

But on Facebook, Marty Baron, the Post’s executive editor until 2021, said: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

As the Post struggled with “head-spinning changes” in media consumption habits, it was battered by “ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top,” Baron said.

Bezos notably reined in a liberal-leaning editorial page and blocked an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris days before the 2024 election – moves breaking the so-called firewall of editorial independence, and seen as bowing the knee to Trump.

In response, “loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled the Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said.

The Post lost around $100 million in 2024 as advertising and subscription revenues fell, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.

This included the loss of 250,000 digital subscribers when Bezos made the Post refrain from endorsing Harris.

In May 2024, Post publisher Will Lewis told staffers the paper had lost $77 million over the past year and lost half of its audience since 2020.