OUR READERS WOULD DEFINITELY HATE IT IF I GOT FIRED
Maybe all of these apocalyptic predictions are correct and this is the last dying gasp of the Washington Post
Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.
The Washington Post laid off a third of its staff yesterday and social media is a GOLD MINE right now …
OUR READERS WOULD DEFINITELY HATE IT IF I GOT FIRED
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: I know we’re not supposed to celebrate or gloat when people get fired.
But sometimes I just can’t help myself.
Rumblings of a major newsroom shakeup at the Washington Post spread across social media early Wednesday morning. All staff were told to stay home and participate in an 8:30 a.m. Zoom call.
The writing was on the wall: a bunch of y’all are getting canned.
Sure enough, one in three employees was let go.
As Trump once said about the auto industry, it was a “bloodbath.”
To be clear, I don’t know that all of the cuts were editorially sound.
Shuttering the sports desk? That’s a bummer.
But, then again, the sports section also had a full front-page spread about competitive Excel sheet-making the week before the biggest sporting event in America. The author of that piece was laid off.
And they’ve been effectively lobbying to get the Redskins to change their name for over a decade, and now we have to call them the Commanders and pretend not to cringe when we say it.
Throwing out a significant portion of the paper’s Ukraine and Middle East coverage? Maybe not wise, unless they were just really struggling to compete with The New York Times and CNN’s International desk.
There’s no question, though, that the Washington Post had become severely bloated and was losing way too much money to justify anything OTHER than chopping off huge lumps of fat.
So when the cuts finally came, they weren’t exactly shocking to anyone watching the numbers.
But what really made the layoffs so satisfying? The generally unhinged reactions from various staffers across social media.
The coping. The seething. The self-righteousness. The narcissism!
Spencer Nusbaum, a beat reporter covering the Washington Nationals — who lost almost as much as WaPo this past season — described the cuts as “gutting for our readers.”
“This is an incalculable loss for the region and sports journalism. It will be jarring to wake up in the morning — in one of the biggest metro areas in the country — and not have a sports section,” he added.
I, too, like baseball. But GUTTING? INCALCULABLE LOSS? Could we be a little less dramatic?
My favorite part is Spencer stating quite confidently that readers will be just devastated if his team leaves the paper. Did he take a survey?
(In case my boss is thinking about firing me, I need you to know that it would be terrible, our readers would absolutely hate it, and the outlet will suffer greatly, if not fail, in my absence. I take no pleasure in saying this, it’s just the reality of the situation.)
I love this video of a different sports reporter hearing the news that his job has been terminated. Pretty insane to set up your camera to make a TikTok of yourself becoming unemployed, but the slack-jawed look of pure shock and defeat is just too perfect.
Perhaps the most deranged reaction came from Rachel Weiner, who wrote on X, “I stopped posting here after one of my (now-former) colleagues was doxxed by white nationalists for writing a story that featured an interracial couple but just to close some loops: I’ve been laid off by the Washington Post. You can find me on the other apps.”
Sorry, Rachel — is it Weiner or Whiner? — but we didn’t need an explanatory virtue signal about your posting habits before letting us know your job has been made redundant.
The Washington Post has also let go a reporter who covered “health disparities and … the way racism & social inequality affects health.” She described herself as “THE generations’ [sic] reporter exploring how health is experienced by different people.”
THE generation’s “doctors be racist” reporter regularly shared incredible stories — like her final one for the paper explaining that black people have lower life expectancies because they carry the stress of microaggressions, code-switching, and “routine slights” on a daily basis.
Now let’s pivot to the responses from the employees who are still aboard the ship. They’re equally insane.
I cannot imagine watching my publisher hack and slash through the newsroom and think, I know what I should do. I should tweet disparagingly about my company and my employer.
Dan Diamond, a Washington Post White House reporter, published a Substack piece bemoaning that their reporting model — the one that apparently isn’t making any money — is “under threat.”
Another reporter spent the morning retweeting external journalists complaining about the cuts, while another shared that no matter what happened to her job she was “furious” and ”angry.”
The former editor of the Post, Marty Baron, is partially responsible for getting them into this mess — he oversaw a growing trust gap between readers and the paper. Nonetheless, he described the layoffs as “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Maybe all of these apocalyptic predictions are correct and this is the last dying gasp of the Washington Post. Or, this could be the kick in the ass they need to get things back on track.
Despite growing up in the DMV, I admittedly don’t have strong feelings about the longevity of the Washington Post. I do have a handful of conservative friends who recently got hired to try to correct course, and I wish them well.
But to all of those who were shown the door today, I have just one thing to say:
The Daily Caller is looking for a new crop of summer interns.
That’s it for the free portion of today’s Unfit to Print.
The full subscriber edition continues below with expanded analysis and additional context.