The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, is laying off staffers as part of a strategic reset

• Jeff Bezos' Washington Post is laying off staffers in a new round of cuts.
• The layoffs are part of a strategic reset, executive editor Matt Murray told staff on Wednesday.
• Murray said the changes included shuttering the Post's sports section and much of the audio department.

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is laying off staffers, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

Executive editor Matt Murray told staff on Wednesday that the cuts were part of a strategic reset, this person said.

Murray said the changes included shuttering the Post's sports section and much of the audio department.

The layoffs arrived after company leadership signaled changes to several of its desks in recent weeks. Management told sports reporters to cancel winter Olympics travel, while foreign correspondents were told to avoid trips to conflict zones, The New York Times reported.

Last week, members of the Post's White House team and other beat reporters sent a series of pleas to Bezos, asking him to avoid cuts that would diminish the newsroom's breadth of coverage, CNN reported.

"These layoffs are not inevitable," the Washington Post Guild, the newsroom's union, wrote in a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday. "A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach, and its future."

A spokesperson for the Post did not immediately provide comment.

This new round of layoffs follows a series of recent shake-ups at the 148-year-old newspaper.

Early last year, the company told its opinions desk that columnists should refocus their coverage to two pillars: "personal liberties" and "free markets." The mandate, which former executive editor Martin Baron told Business Insider made him "sad and disgusted," led to a rush of columnist departures.

"Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section," Baron wrote at the time.

In March, the Post reorganized its newsroom in a push to shift away from "commodity news." It then offered buy-outs to staffers in May.

Last year's personnel shifts arrived shortly after the Washington Post came under fire from some readers for its decision to skip endorsing a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, breaking from a 35-year tradition. Some critics argued that the decision could have been made to curry favor with Donald Trump.

Over 400 staffers sent a letter to Bezos last January, writing that they were "deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave."

The Post's staff reductions arrive at a challenging moment for the media industry. Some brands are seeing revenue fall off due to declines in social media and search traffic. The rise of AI is also squeezing the industry as more readers gather information from chatbots rather than visiting web pages.