Amber Ferguson was on vacation when the Executive Editor of The Washington Post, Matt Murray, announced massive cuts to the staff on Feb. 4. Ferguson, who worked at the Post for nine years, most recently as a rapid response culture reporter, was among those laid off.
Suddenly, the Slack channel for the Post Guild, the employees’ union, flooded with identical messages reading “I’m eliminated.” Then she saw the names of people on her team.
“Seeing just the sheer number of how every single department basically was hit in some way, I think it was just shocking,” Ferguson said.
That Wednesday, the Post fired an estimated 44% to 47.5% of its journalists in an effort to cut costs, according to an email from Murray to the newsroom. Now, D.C. journalists worry about what these changes will mean for the future of media in the District, especially in a city where local news coverage has faced major cuts for years.
The Post’s Sports and Books sections will close, along with their premiere daily podcast, Post Reports. The Metro and International sections will be fundamentally reduced. And, as a significant portion of the photo team was cut, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning visual coverage is expected to suffer.
After a company-wide call, employees were notified by email whether they were laid off.
“I honestly think it was ruthless what they did and how they did it,” Ferguson said. “I mean, to just send a generic email without even putting my name on it.”
For Ferguson and many others, working for the Post was more than just a job.
“It was representation in the sense that, being a young woman of color, I felt like there were so few of us there. And then responsibility, because I’m also from Prince George’s County, so it’s my local paper,” Ferguson said.
She remembers growing up doing activities in the now-retired KidsPost section while her grandfather read Sports and her grandmother read Metro, trading the front page with each other. Once she started working at the Post, these local roots informed her pitches and coverage.
Even before the cuts, Ferguson said she constantly faced barriers in her reporting, with editors saying they lacked the resources to execute her ideas. She recalled suggesting a local-focused Instagram page, similar to Style, Sports, Climate, and Wellness. She was told there was no one to run the page.
With relatively limited staff and budgets, Ferguson said that working at the Post required a certain amount of scrappiness.
“You had to do a lot of roles, it felt like. But that made you closer to your stories,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson pointed to the Post’s coverage of the March 2024 collapse of the Key Bridge and the Jan. 2025 American Airlines plane crash in the Potomac as substantial examples of important local coverage to which she brought a close-up perspective. For Ferguson, it’s these local stories that really set the Post apart.
“If you take away The Washington Post and how big the local coverage was, you’re taking away voices,” Ferguson said. “I think you’re going to get a more generic news story.”
E.J. Dionne Jr., a government professor at Georgetown and regular columnist of 35 years who left the Post in August, shared similar concerns.
“It pains me to see a great national institution that was really important to people’s understanding of how government worked be in such trouble,” Dionne said. “It’s my gratitude to the place that makes me feel so, just so profoundly sad about what’s happened.”
Dionne points to the decrease in papers covering local news as one of the greatest issues facing the media industry. According to the Medill State of Local News Report, an estimated 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. In 2025, 136 newspapers closed, averaging out to more than two per week.
“It’s representative in certain ways of the challenges we have in the country about covering local government, local school boards. What happens in these communities?” Dionne said. “We’re just losing a lot in that area.”
Dionne recalled a time when the Post focused on its local coverage, using its national standing to serve the larger D.C. metropolitan area. For a while, the Post had “highest penetration rate in any metro area,” a reflection of the paper’s choice to prioritize its local readers, according to Dionne.
Unlike The New York Times, the Post remained focused on its daily local print product, choosing not to extend printing past the East Coast and only publishing a weekly national newspaper.
Further, Dionne remembers that Watergate, one of the biggest stories in U.S. history, started as a local police story.
“When the Post was covering the federal government, it was covering a local industry,” Dionne said. “When it covered national politics, it was covering a significant part of what made this whole area home. So, it’s losing that local focus.”
Dionne believes that strong local newspapers create a sense of place and bring the community together by “becoming a bundle.”
“When you thought of a local newspaper, it was, yes, local, state, national, and international news. But it was also recipes and supermarket coupons and local sports and crossword puzzles and comics,” Dionne said.
After buying the Post for $250 million in 2013, billionaire Jeff Bezos met with reporters and editors to emphasize his goal of continuing the “daily ritual” of reading the Post as a collective paper, not individual stories, according to reporting by the news agency.
“People will buy a package,” Bezos told select staff, the newspaper reported at the time. “They will not pay for a story.”
Now, many point to Bezos as a threat to the paper’s future, with his widespread cuts significantly diminishing the Post’s package.
Andrew Beaujon, a senior editor at Washingtonian, a monthly magazine focused on D.C., recalled a time when the Post had expanded ambition for local coverage, such as when the paper moved into Annapolis and Richmond, covering state governments in Virginia and Maryland.
“The Post has always done a really good job of covering the whole area, and not just how things affect middle-class and wealthy white people,” Beaujon said, adding that this is a major problem for the media in general. He worries that the Post may lose this breadth of coverage with the cuts.
To Beaujon, the Post’s problems are rooted in its leadership issues.
“This is not a content problem that they’re facing,” Beaujon said. “It’s a business problem that one of the world’s wealthiest people and supposed business geniuses who rolled in with all these stupid goals—like that they were gonna get 200 million subscribers—haven’t been able to solve.”
Beaujon fears that with the layoffs, there will be less ability to hold those in power accountable.
“I think Jeff Bezos is really ushering in a grand era of political incompetence and corruption. I don’t think he could have done a bigger favor to crooked people in this region,” Beaujon said.
The Post’s problems with Bezos are not new: after he blocked their endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, the Post lost over 200,000 subscribers. While the cuts are supposed to alleviate financial issues, with them comes major losses.
María Luisa Paúl, a national breaking news reporter with a focus on immigration, said that despite rumors about downsizing in the weeks prior, the cuts were still shocking. Paúl and her team did not expect breaking news to be affected.
“We’re breaking news, and there’s so much breaking news every single day!” Paúl said. “There were just so many weeks of us theorizing and trying to talk ourselves into reasons of why we wouldn’t be cut, or why we would, and it was awful.”
Paúl said that the now-eliminated breaking news team brought in substantial page views and subscribers, producing high output with limited resources. The group, she said, was “truly a microcosm of this country.”
“Each of us brought in our own experiences and our own background, and you could tell how that is important when it comes to storytelling,” Paúl said.
With the cuts, Paúl is worried about the communities that may no longer be covered, including Spanish speakers. Further, she is concerned about what the decline of journalistic coverage means for the U.S.
“The U.S. has a tendency to take [journalism] for granted, because the free press has always existed,” Paúl said. “But I’m from Venezuela, and back home, one of the first things to disappear was the free press. And the moment that journalists stop doing their job, or their outlets start being censored or persecuted, that’s the second you lose democracy.”
The Post’s February layoffs are neither the organization’s first cuts to local coverage nor the first hits to D.C.’s local news ecosystem recently.
Annemarie Cuccia (SFS ’22)—the editor-in-chief of Street Sense Media, a street paper focused on reporting about homelessness and poverty—found the Post’s layoffs to be disappointing, but not shocking.
“It seems like the hits sort of keep coming to D.C. journalism,” Cuccia said.
Cuccia pointed to WAMU shutting down DCist two years ago as an example.
Cuccia, as editor of a paper focused on homelessness, is particularly concerned that the Post’s housing-related reporting will severely decrease. While the Post once had the capacity to cover the D.C. Housing Authority—particularly coverage of council meetings—Cuccia worries that will be lost, as many housing-related reporters were cut.
Further, the Post’s scope for both local and national coverage differentiates it from other District newsrooms, meaning that it could be difficult for exclusively local news agencies to fill in some of the gaps.
“Especially in the coming years, you could see a lot of federally relevant stories coming out of this city, and I think the Post is a good vehicle for that, because it is both,” Cuccia said.
Cuccia pointed to The 51st and Washington City Paper as examples of local publications that may expand their local coverage in response.
“I’m curious. There’s one world in which maybe it looks like a lot of Post journalists are still reporting in D.C., but at different outlets,” Cuccia said. “So local reporting is still there, but less concentrated.”
Similar to Cuccia, Mitch Ryals, the managing editor at Washington City Paper, sees potential for local publications.
“It appears as if there will be sort of, at least initially, a hodgepodge of local outlets that are going to try and make up for whatever the Post will be lacking,” Ryals said.
He is worried, however, that the impact of the Post’s layoffs will be hard to track because stories just won’t get reported on. While Washington City Paper has scaled back their print publication, Ryals hopes his team can increase the quantity of local coverage.
“The role of journalists is an essential part of democracy, which we still have here, thankfully, at least for now. So there will always be the need for news and for information and for honest, hard-working, truth-seeking storytellers,” Ryals said.
Ryals also remains hopeful because of community responses to the cuts.
“Seeing all the support and the clamor and all the buzz around people wanting to step up after the announcement of the layoffs is evidence that people recognize the value of this work and of these roles,” Ryals said. “I’m holding on to that for as long as I can.”
