On February 4, The Washington Post laid off roughly 30 percent of its employees, including about 300 of some 800 journalists. The newspaper eliminated its sports section, closed several foreign bureaus, and ended standalone books coverage.
Founded in 1877, the Post is one of the largest daily newspapers in the U.S. today. Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the magazine in 2013 and helped to modernize its digital presence, as well as aiding in its overall strategic and editorial direction.
The Post’s cuts were reportedly driven by significant financial losses from declining digital traffic and subscriber cancellations. A day after the layoffs, however, Amazon announced plans to invest approximately $200 billion over the next year in artificial intelligence, robotics, and related infrastructure.
Although Amazon’s investment plan and the Post’s layoffs concern different segments of Bezos’s business interests, the timing drew attention. Across the tech sector, large firms—including Amazon—have cut corporate and technical roles in recent years as they reorganize for efficiency, often citing AI as part of broader strategic shifts that emphasize automation.
Harvard Magazine asked Thomas E. Patterson and Nancy Gibbs, two experts on media and politics, about how journalism is changing in 2026 in response to digital disruptions including AI.
Patterson is the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard Kennedy School and author of three books on mass media and politics, including The Unseeing Eye (1977), named one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion of the past half century.
Gibbs is the Murrow professor of the practice of press, politics, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, the Lombard director of the Shorenstein Center, and the former editor in chief of TIME magazine—a role she held from 2013 to 2018, after more than three decades at the publication.
1. The Washington Post once framed itself as a civic institution willing to lose money in service of democracy. Has platform-driven distribution—such as browser searches, social media, and AI summaries—fundamentally broken that model, or did ownership lose faith in journalism’s non-market value?
Gibbs: There’s a third possibility. Henry Luce, who founded Time Inc., once observed, “Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business.” Major news organizations like The Washington Post are commercial enterprises that aim to be profitable—but journalists aim to hold the powerful to account without fear or favor. That’s why newsrooms talk about a firewall protecting reporters from pressure from owners. During President Donald Trump’s first term, Jeff Bezos supported the newsroom and its editor, Marty Baron, even when this threatened his other businesses. I can’t speculate about what changed in his priorities; I leave that to the therapists. Suffice to say, the excellence of the editorial side was not matched by the business side, and one terrible decision after another drove the enterprise into the ground.
Patterson: The Post has struggled with the declining business model facing all U.S. newspapers, compounded by missteps like rescinding its Kamala Harris endorsement at Bezos’s direction—prompting nearly 10 percent of its subscribers to cancel. The paper was already deep in the red before this development, but it may have hastened the decision to cut its newsroom by a third. It’s possible the cutbacks reflect Bezos’s effort to cozy up to the Trump administration. Bezos could be the only one who knows that answer, but it’s clear, as a business decision, that shielding Amazon from government regulation easily outweighs maintaining the Post’s journalistic clout.
Notably, Bezos didn’t shut down the Post, so it retains a civic role, albeit at reduced scale. I’m less concerned about the closure of its foreign bureaus—there are better sources of international news—than the sharp reduction of the metro desk, which has long provided vital coverage of Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, and Maryland. The desk has also produced breaking stories of national importance, such as the Watergate scandal uncovered by metro reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
2. If elite national newsrooms can no longer sustain large investigative staffs, where does accountability journalism migrate?
Gibbs: I’d caution against taking the plight of the Post as a death knell for serious investigative journalism. The Wall Street Journal (owned by another billionaire) is thriving under editor Emma Tucker and regularly breaking substantial stories that enrage the White House. The New York Times has crossed 12 million subscribers. Nonprofit newsrooms like Pro Publica and open-source Bellingcat regularly provide deep accountability reporting, as do small regional outfits like Mississippi Today. And these high performing newsrooms provide the raw material for the large and growing universe of YouTubers and Substackers and creators who curate and comment on the news. The ecosystem of accountability is not just dissolving, it’s evolving.
Patterson: Across the newspaper industry, the capacity for investigative journalism has declined compared to decades past. However, a few outlets like The New York Times have maintained—or even strengthened—their investigative teams. Despite this, much accountability journalism is now produced by nonprofits, university reporting centers, and local newsroom collaborations. Organizations such as Pro Publica and the Center for Investigative Reporting fill critical gaps, often partnering with traditional media to amplify their impact. Universities offer students hands-on investigative experience while contributing to the public good, and local collaborations, typically supported by community foundations, address issues that might otherwise be overlooked. These developments are promising, yet these alternatives generally lack the scale and stable funding of legacy newsrooms. There isn’t yet an accountability crisis in journalism, but the long-term sustainability of some of these newer models is uncertain. Foundation support for journalism, for example, tends to fluctuate, and some signs suggest it has plateaued.
3. What does it say about the current media economy that Jeff Bezos can cite AI-driven search disruption to justify firing hundreds of journalists from the Post, while Amazon announces plans to spend roughly $200 billion in a single year?
Gibbs: Many people have found vivid ways to make the point that this was not a financial decision. Peter Baker at the Times noted that Bezos’s net worth when he bought the Post in 2013 was $25 billion; it is now 10 times that. His yacht cost $500 million. He earns every week what the Post was on track to lose over the next five years. I don’t think it says much about the media economy; it says more about Jeff Bezos.
Patterson: This question speaks to speculation that Bezos’s motivation was politics, not money. That could be true, but the situation underscores the fragile financial foundations of newspapers, even under wealthy ownership. In this sense, the issue extends beyond Bezos. The idea that billionaires should subsidize essential news coverage has been seen as a solution to the crisis in local journalism. However, the reality is that few wealthy individuals are eager to invest in money-losing newspapers when there are other, potentially more impactful ways to support their communities. The way Bezos and others allocate their philanthropic efforts deserves scrutiny, but reducing investment in a newspaper is not inherently uncharitable. Even with the large staff cuts, the Post remains by my calculations a money loser. Not $100 million a year in the red, but perhaps $50 million or so. While it’s troubling to see the staff reductions, it’s notable that the Post still has a newsroom of about 400 journalists—larger than nearly all other U.S. papers.
4. To what extent is AI genuinely destabilizing journalism’s business model?
Gibbs: As with so many industries, AI is a driver of innovation, efficiency, and opportunity, while carrying the potential for enormous harm. Platforms were already de-prioritizing news; now a search will yield an AI summary without taking you to the original source. We are looking at a ferocious battle over intellectual property, and journalism is just one of many litigants. It is far too soon to count winners and losers.
Patterson: Like similar breakthroughs, AI is a disruptive technology. It introduces even more competition for people’s attention in an already fragmented and hyper-competitive environment. For struggling newspapers, additional competitors contribute to a further decline in audience and revenue, giving owners yet another justification for cost-cutting. However, the story of AI is not one-sided. Unlike their slow response to the internet, many newspapers have embraced AI, leveraging it to boost productivity. AI speeds up content creation and lowers research costs, enabling newsrooms to do more with fewer staff. This comes with challenges, such as concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated content, but the benefits so far outweigh the drawbacks, both editorially and on the business side, such as through improved engagement metrics and hyper-targeted advertising. A major concern, though, is that chain-owned newspapers—and most dailies are chain-owned—may use AI’s efficiency as a reason to permanently cut staff, rather than as a tool to enhance reporting capacity. If profit becomes the prime motivation, the potential gains from AI will be lost.
5. Looking ahead five to 10 years, is the erosion of legacy outlets such as the Post more likely to weaken democratic accountability, or will new forms of journalism emerge that are better suited to a fragmented, AI-mediated information environment?
Gibbs: I don’t think you can separate the fate of mainstream newsrooms from the success and growth of independent media or AI-mediated information. Someone has to be on the frontlines, knock on doors, cultivate confidential sources, file Freedom of Information Act requests, do the hard work of finding things out. Then countless writers and robots can repackage that information in countless forms. The value and reliability of the whole information ecosystem still depend on the energy, enterprise, and expertise of the first responders. So, it is imperative that we find new ways to support journalists and those who perform the function of journalism.
Patterson: While AI will undoubtedly reshape journalism, the nature of the change remains uncertain. The imperative at the moment is finding ways to support quality reporting during the transition period. I recently studied local TV stations to explore how they might address the information gaps left by shrinking newspapers. The results were mixed, but encouraging insights emerged: stations that invested more in investigative, enterprise, and community-focused journalism were most likely to grow their audiences over the past two years. Notably, these gains were achieved not with a larger staff but by strategically reallocating staff resources. The takeaway isn’t that we don’t need new models, but that existing outlets must rethink how they deploy their journalists. Prioritizing timely coverage of important events and holding the powerful to account should be front and center. If newspapers focused their limited resources on these two missions, it wouldn’t prevent the broader collapse of their business model, but it would help reduce the information deficit until new, sustainable models for high-quality journalism can take root.
