Jolting news out of The Washington Post this week.
Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sent out a memo to staff on Tuesday announcing plans to offer voluntary buyouts, in hopes of reducing its staff by 240. The Post has approximately 2,500 employees.
A meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday to go over the buyouts, and to announce which employees and departments are eligible.
In the note, Stonesifer called it “difficult news” and wrote, “To be clear, we designed this program to reduce our workforce by approximately 240 employees in the hopes of averting more difficult actions such as layoffs — a situation we are united in trying to avoid.”
The plan is that the Post will cap the number of acceptances at 240. But what happens if 240 people don’t volunteer? Stonesifer’s note said the Post hopes to avert layoffs, but the note did not make any promises. She wrote, “… we are working to find ways to return our business to a healthier place in the coming year.”
The Post’s Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported that Stonesifer said subscription, traffic and advertising projections over the past two years had been “overly optimistic.”
In August 2022, The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson wrote, “The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.”
The Times reported at the time that the Post was on track to lose money in 2022 after years of making money. Again, this was a year ago and, apparently, the situation hasn’t gotten sunnier. Last January, the Post reduced staff by approximately 50, including 20 layoffs.
Mullin and Robertson wrote another story this past July that the Post was on track to lose $100 million this year.
Still, the Post’s Sommer and Izadi wrote Tuesday that the memo announcing buyout offers “caught staffers off guard.” They wrote, “The announcement Tuesday is reminiscent of the way The Post handled staff reductions in a bygone era, through the rounds of voluntary buyouts that became a hallmark of the years before Bezos’s purchase of The Post in 2013.”
Company spokesperson Kathy Baird told the Post that the buyouts should put the Post “in a strong place for 2024 and beyond.” But, she added, “this decision is still difficult knowing some of our valued colleagues may choose to leave at the end of the year.”
The little we know about Marty Baron
For this item, I turn it over to Poynter media business analyst Rick Edmonds.
Marty Baron is famous for, among other things, revealing very little of himself personally to the journalists who work with him. His freshly released book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post,” is true to form.
When the Amazon delivery man knocked on the door Sunday with my copy, I flipped right to the index. Sure enough, Baron, now 68 and retired as the Post’s executive editor, offered exactly two such nuggets in a 478-page narrative.
On page 2, he describes himself physically as having “a trimmed beard, wooly head of hair, and what was invariably described as my dour and taciturn demeanor.” Pretty much what the actor Liev Schreiber uncannily embodied in “Spotlight,” the movie about The Boston Globe’s expose of pedophile priests.
Late in the book, Baron writes that his decision to retire was influenced by a rare medical condition. It caused nosebleeds so severe that on a number of days he needed to stay home and twice went to the emergency room.
Fortunately, some of the blanks are filled in an excellent profile by a former Boston Globe colleague, Mark Shanahan, titled “The Inscrutable Marty Baron.” In a nearly three-hour interview, he didn’t extract zingy self-examination, but he did harvest telling anecdotes from friends and co-workers.
Shanahan leads with one of those — Baron garishly dressed at a Halloween party at an alt-rock venue, dancing the Electric Slide. A photo exists, Shanahan said, but no one would share it with him.
The profile includes a story of Baron reading rejection letters from Princeton, Amherst and Williams in a speech at his former high school. At a memorable dinner in Boston, after Baron had hired me to do a news staff seminar on math, he told me the expanded version of his Princeton experience. He was disappointed and indignant but didn’t stop at that. He wrote and called the admissions dean, arguing that they had it wrong and should reconsider. Thirty years later, Baron was still angry.
(He went to Lehigh as an undergraduate, earned an MBA there, and obviously has done just fine.)
Such tenaciousness and self-confidence have served Baron well as the editor in charge of huge stories, including Donald Trump’s election and four-year term. I’d like to know more about his own view of how he became one of the master editors of his generation. He has offered a few sound truisms like demanding more and more reporting.
I am not looking for Baron to write that book, part how-to, part memoir. It will probably take another author willing to report, report, report and then report some more.
Notable coverage from Israel and the Gaza Strip
