I lost my job at The Washington Post

This feels like a full circle moment. I started this newsletter in 2023 to continue writing about games after I was laid off from Launcher, The Washington Post’s video game section. But before my time at The Post formally ended, some kind and thoughtful people in the newsroom intervened on my behalf to move me into a role on the international desk, where I became evening editor. Now, three years later, I’ve been laid off from that role too, along with hundreds of my coworkers who were swept up in a major restructuring at the newspaper. I haven’t seen any concrete data, but The New York Times has the tally at 300 journalists cut from a staff of roughly 800. “Devastating” would be an understatement.

I’m going to save recriminations and rage for another day (I am still technically employed by The Post for a few more weeks; in the interest of receiving my severance I will tread carefully here) but for now I want to reflect on my time at the paper, explain what I did there, and briefly defend “the media” — an entity with an ever-shrinking pool of supporters. (What can I say: I’m feeling a bit sensitive right now. I hope you can forgive a bit of rambling.) For folks in the industry, a lot of what I’m going to say will seem self-evident. But I imagine that a healthy portion of my readership (read: gamers) doesn’t care at all about/is suspicious of the media, or else understandably finds the idea of newspapers more than a little old-fashioned. This is for them.

I lucked into both of my jobs at The Post. My role as an editor on Launcher materialized after a casual conversation with my eventual editor, Mike Hume, at a holiday party hosted by a different media company. (I joke sometimes that I don’t remember that pivotal first conversation because the party had an open bar. I’m glad I still managed to make an impression!) During the day-long final interview process for that role, a senior executive quizzed me on what I might want to do after Launcher. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Was that supposed to be a trick question? Eventually, the interviewer understood my hesitation. “We’re looking for lifers,” she said. Might I be interested in becoming a foreign correspondent, she asked, should I ever tire of the video game beat?

I never quite got there, but I’m beyond grateful that I got to work alongside The Post’s correspondents and the rest of the staff on the international desk (notwithstanding the circumstances that precipitated that move). My colleagues — in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, Venezuela, Seoul, London, Australia and so many other places, as well as those in Washington, D.C. — are all, without exception, impressive journalists.¹ I have received drafts written from war zones, and paragraphs filed just minutes after the threat of rocket fire had passed. I’ve watched my coworkers pore over satellite footage and shipping data or, on occasion, distressing photos, video and audio. I’ve seen them compile extensive lists of prospective sources, diligently dialing every one in hopes of getting a foothold in a story. In that same vein, I once witnessed an intern (!) get three quotes from three expert sources in as many minutes. And I’ve participated in those just-a-few-minute-long scrums in which every word of a two sentence breaking news push notification is combed over once and again and ten more time after that in a race against the clock — and against our competitors. The quiet, day-to-day work was just as admirable.²

The inner workings of a media company can seem arcane, but for the vast majority of people it is just a job, with peaks and valleys and, yes, meetings. The typical day for me at Launcher started with a meeting — what are the big news stories of the day, what are we looking out for, what is the status of such and such draft, etc. — and then largely came down to editing work that was filed to me with an eye toward these criteria: Are the sentences legible? Are the paragraphs in the right order? Is there some obvious thing we’re missing or don’t have enough of in the article? Did we talk to enough people? And so on. My typical day as an evening editor was basically the same thing in reverse, ending with a Zoom call to The Post’s office in Seoul to explain to my colleagues there what had happened on the D.C. shift, what stories we were monitoring, the state of such and such draft, etc. And because I know people will ask: There were occasional editorial judgments I disagreed with, but they always came from within the team. I never experienced any influence or pressure from on high³ , and certainly not from Jeff Bezos, who just categorically never intervened in news coverage. (Although you can certainly make the case that layoffs are an intervention in their own right; I won’t disagree with you there. It would also not be unfair to say that Bezos’s meddling in the opinion section, which cost the paper hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, had major downstream implications for the news product: some sources grew wary of speaking with Post reporters, and the revenue losses precipitated cuts to newsroom budgets and staff — a long way around, bumbling intervention of sorts.)

This is all so obvious that I’m ambivalent about keeping it in, but I will in the naive hope of persuading one or two of you that “the media” is not a scary or malicious entity but by and large just an infrastructure of people doing uncontroversial work at a laptop job to the best of their ability — with the unusual complication of millions of people watching for them to slip up. I can picture someone reading this now and thinking: Well, sure, that’s all great, but I really can’t forgive XYZ outlet for ABC mistake they made.⁴ I am not here to tell you that you’re wrong for feeling that way.⁵ I am not here to convince you to subscribe or resubscribe or, god forbid, unsubscribe⁶ from this or that publication. I am asking that you extend some grace to people working in an increasingly precarious industry,⁷ and exercise discernment over whether your problems with “the media” have to do with people you see blathering on on TV or in the opinion pages.

The internet has convinced a great many people that good information from anywhere around the world is easy to find. I disagree. Two recent Post stories from the international desk, both published within the past few weeks, come to mind. The first, about Kenyan job seekers being lured to Russia and forcibly enlisted to fight in Ukraine, involved finding and speaking with men who survived the practice, as well as the family members of those who didn’t — and earning their trust. The second, a detailed account of a massacre by Iranian forces of protesters fleeing a burning market, is bylined by five journalists, a mix of reporters specializing in the Middle East and visual forensics staff who “analyzed more than 40 photos and videos and collected six witness and resident testimonies” amid a shutdown of internet and telephone service in Iran. I didn’t work on either of these stories in any capacity. I bring them up because of how improbable it would be for any random person, even someone very invested in learning the information within those stories, to come about their findings independently. This work is expensive. It requires tons of attention and support from editors and lawyers and fact checkers and design staff. It is also good, in the moral sense. The Post’s recent cuts make it very difficult — virtually impossible, I’d say — to continue that kind of work, seemingly by design.

Would welcome people’s questions and input (and job offers). More thoughts TK, eventually.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1  This video makes for a pretty good summary of the kinds of reporting my colleagues did, and the risks they assumed in doing that work. See also: Lizzie Johnson, one of our Ukraine correspondents, tweeted on Wednesday that she had been laid off “in the middle of a warzone.”

2  I will resist the urge to go long in singing the praises of my colleagues because frankly I’m just not the best person to do that. From the vantage of the evening shift, I didn’t have the best view of all of my colleagues’ work, and in truth (hiring managers, skip this footnote) I was a mostly unremarkable member of the team. There are moments I’m exceptionally proud of: I was a fiend for live blogging breaking news! But I was also burnt out and demoralized at times for reasons that had little to do with the job. I feel a little embarrassed to say that but it’s true. (For more comprehensive eulogies/tributes to The Post, I’d recommend this piece in The Atlantic or this one from The New Yorker. This one in The New York Times is nice too.)

3  Recent news — The Post spiked a story by its media team about layoffs at paper, the Status newsletter reported Thursday — compels me to note that when this does happen, it happens over the objections of staff, not with their consent.

4  I recently rewatched All the President’s Men, the seminal political thriller about The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, and was shocked to discover that the movie prominently features an embarrassing flub by Woodward and Bernstein, the reporting duo whose work led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. There’s a moment in which the two publish a story that gets a crucial detail wrong, prompting a public denial from the story’s source and the White House. This mistake brought on all sorts of headaches for The Post in real life, but it’s safe to say that in the grand scheme of things, it’s just not the thing most people remember about the paper’s role in Watergate.

5  My position is pro-journalism and pro media-criticism. Some favorites of mine: James Carey’s The Dark Continent of American Journalism and Michael Massing’s “Now They Tell Us.” The push and pull of publication and feedback is a feature, not a bug!

6  I wrote this a few months ago about Polygon but it applies here now to what remains of The Washington Post: “I feel quite badly for the folks who have remained at the site newspaper and tried to chart a sensible course forward. There are people I know and care about (not at Polygon The Washington Post, or even in games journalism) who have at times been made miserable by mismanagement, but who have chosen to white knuckle it and keep trying to do good work. There are all sorts of practical reasons someone might opt to do this. I have also seen people in those positions taking additional psychic damage from ostensible allies shit-talking too cavalierly. Not to literally do the meme, but: The Valnet freaks my former bosses will never see your posts. But the folks still at Polygon The Washington Post whose work you liked four months ago may, in fact, see your posts about how the site is total shit now and everyone who works there must be a sickly little gremlin.”

7  I wasn’t really sure where to put this, but if you enjoyed Heated Rivalry, it was a story in The Post by Rachel Kurzius that convinced showrunner and director Jacob Tierney to seek out the rights to the book. Rachel was also laid off this week.