“Democracy Dies in Darkness, Huh?”: Washington Post Publisher Stuns Newsroom With Layoff Bombshell—And Hasty Exit

The Washington Post Guild went into Wednesday’s town hall with a plan. Anticipating that publisher Fred Ryan wasn’t going to take live questions—he wasn’t so happy the last time he was publicly confronted by a staffer in such a forum—they’d crowd-sourced a list of questions in advance and got more than 70 staffers to send a version of these questions to HR, according to a member of the Guild. The Guild had 10 designated questioners who would pop up during the Q&A portion of Wednesday’s town hall. 

But when that time came, after an hour-plus meeting of presentations for various initiatives, like the Post’s climate coverage and David Shipley’s plans for the Editorial page, things went awry. Ryan launched into a scripted speech in which he dropped the news that there would be additional layoffs coming—a “number of positions” would be eliminated in the first quarter of 2023, he said, without specifying what parts of the company would be impacted. As staffers pressed for more questions, Ryan started to leave the meeting, stopping in the aisle to say he didn’t want the town hall to turn “into a grievance session for the Guild,” as documented in a video tweeted by national correspondent Annie Gowen: 

“Could you get worse internal PR than this?” as one Post staffer put it to me, noting everyone understands the business reality of the media industry right now. “It isn’t even the specific answers as the willingness to entertain the questions that’s important,” they said. “These are people’s livelihoods; these are people’s family’s. It’s a big deal.”

“He ran away. He’s the publisher of a news organization and he wouldn’t take questions from his staff. Democracy dies in darkness, huh?” said Katie Mettler, who has been cochair of the Post Guild for nearly four years. “The whole staff sat there, stunned.” 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Post confirmed “a number of positions will be eliminated” but anticipated it would impact “a single digit percentage of our employee base” and said plans would be finalized in the coming weeks. “This will not be a net reduction in Post headcount. Recently, we have made some of the largest investments in The Post’s history and 2023 will be another year of continued investment.”

Staff at the Post have been on edge for weeks now, ever since executive editor Sally Buzbee announced that the Post would be killing its weekly magazine—eliminating, with it, the positions of the magazine’s 10 staffers. Amid the cuts, Pulitzer Prize winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman, who spent a quarter-century at the paper, was also laid off. “Are we going to be treated like the magazine staffers were?” one member of the audience asked Ryan as he tried to leave the town hall Wednesday. “We’ll have more information as we move forward. Thank you very much,” Ryan replied. Amid a flurry of shouted questions, someone called out to Ryan, “You are disrespecting this room.” 

“I’ve been at the paper a long time and never seen anything like that,” said the staffer. “If the president calls a press conference and then decides I’m not gonna take any questions, people are both stumped and pissed. And that’s the reaction to this.”