The Washington Post announced on Tuesday that will probably be chopping 240 jobs by providing voluntary buyouts to its employees.
In an e-mail despatched to staff on Tuesday, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer defined that the Submit had been “overly optimistic” about its subscription, visitors and promoting projections over the previous two years, the information outlet stated.
“The pressing must put money into our prime progress priorities introduced us to the tough conclusion that we have to alter our price construction now,” Stonesifer stated within the e-mail, in response to the Submit.
The corporate determined to go for voluntary buyouts, which might be supplied for particular jobs and departments, as a strategy to keep away from potential layoffs. The e-mail didn’t specify which positions and departments can be supplied buyouts, NPR reported. Extra particulars concerning the buyout will reportedly be supplied throughout a employees assembly scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m.
“To be clear, we designed this program to scale back our workforce by roughly 240 staff within the hopes of averting harder actions similar to layoffs – a state of affairs we’re united in making an attempt to keep away from,” Stonesifer wrote.
The Submit at present has a complete of 2,500 employees, and practically 1,000 of them work within the newsroom, The New York Times reported, so the buyouts will have an effect on about 10% of the corporate’s workforce. In January, the Submit laid off 20 staffers and eradicated its Sunday journal due to declining promoting income and readership.
The media business has confronted a file variety of layoffs this yr, in response to Axios, with at the very least 17,436 job cuts introduced by June. Information shops similar to Vox Media, NPR and the Los Angeles Instances introduced plans to considerably cut back their workforces in 2023, whereas BuzzFeed, JS’s mother or father firm, shut down its total information division this yr.
