The Washington Post carried out a widespread round of layoffs on Wednesday that decimated the organisation’s sports, local news and international coverage, reports The New York Times.

The company laid off about 30 per cent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet.

The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.

‘If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,’ Murray said. ‘And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.’

Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was ‘too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product’ and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s ‘daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.’

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Murray allowed for the possibility that The Post could eventually grow its newsroom again, saying that he didn’t expect this to be ‘the final end-all-be-all footprint of our newsroom forever.’ He said that journalists across various sections would continue to team up on stories, despite warnings from departing employees that the cuts could hobble staff members’ ability to work together.

‘We can’t be all things to all people, but I think that kind of collaboration and that kind of work across the newsroom is going to continue and will continue to distinguish our journalism,’ Murray said.

The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the ‘Post Reports’ daily news podcast.

Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia. In the interview, Murray took responsibility for the cuts, saying they were part of a plan he put together with his team.

Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.

As emails notifying employees that they were laid off began landing in inboxes, journalists at The Post began notifying their colleagues that their positions had been cut. ‘Eliminated,’ ‘Eliminated,’ ‘Eliminated,’ their messages to one another read.

Some of the departures shocked the newsroom, including that of a Ukraine correspondent who was laid off while working in a war zone, and the cutting of all staff photographers. A sports reporter in Italy for the Winter Olympics said that he would keep filing articles despite being laid off.

Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions. Lewis has experimented with several changes to transform the organisation, notably embracing artificial intelligence to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.