The Washington Post and the tragic decline of newspapers

And, just maybe, of climate journalism.

The Washington Post offices in downtown Washington, D.C. on June 21, 2024. Photo by ajay_suresh, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

I started working at the Washington Post in 2014. I arrived having already made a mark for myself as a science writer and author, but in this place, I was nothing special. Here everybody was distinguished. There were legions of storied journalists and writers. Many had written books. Some had decades more experience than I did.

And so, I settled in to write and learn during one of the paper’s many distinguished eras, the late 2010s. It now feels like a golden age, in light of the shocking and tragic news this week that the Post has laid off some 300 journalists, including many climate, photo, and video journalists with whom I worked closely. (The paper’s controversial publisher, Will Lewis, resigned following the cuts.)

I saw the Post from the inside during the first Trump administration, with Marty Baron running the show. I watched brilliant Post journalists land scoop after scoop. Web traffic to the paper exploded.

In my own little corner of things, climate change reporting was also scoring wins and starting to expand. We were trying out some innovative projects, like a joint video and text series called “Gone in a Generation.” I worked on it with the courageous video journalist Zoeann Murphy, and it was nominated for an Emmy, though it did not win. Zoeann was one of so many decorated visual journalists let go from the Post yesterday, as both video and photo journalism saw severe cuts, along with so many other sections, ranging from sports to international reporting.

For a time, I was the main reporter covering climate change. But there were others, and we were soon organized under a team led by Trish Wilson, an inspiring editor who cared deeply about narrative writing (too few at newspapers do, alas) and wanted to do something ambitious. The result was “2°C: Beyond the Limit,” our Pulitzer winning climate series (thanks so much to Andy Revkin for flagging my role in this!)

That sent a message: climate journalism at the big papers, which had long existed (see aka the work of Andrew Revkin, above), was becoming an area of increasing focus. We were hardly the only ones investing in it in a big way.

The New York Times had formed its independent climate team back in 2017, building upon a prior climate focused group within the Science section that began three years earlier. The Associated Press would announce a big expansion and focused desk in 2022, the same year the Post went even farther and upped the team to over 30 journalists.

How quickly things would change.

A major climate reporting rollback

Sammy Roth reported that the Post let “at least” 14 climate change journalists go in this week’s layoffs, including editors and reporters primarily focused on graphics or video. Sarah Kaplan, a Post reporter speaking in her capacity as chief steward of the Post’s newspaper guild (but who also happens to cover climate change and is a longtime colleague), confirmed this basic picture to me. “The climate team lost well over half of its members,” said Kaplan, who was not let go. Kaplan counted ten climate focused journalists left, though that includes columnists and editors.

“How do you cover global climate change with 4 or 5 reporters?” added Brianna Sacks, also a reporter covering climate change with a focus on disasters, who was not let go. Sacks has been outspoken in criticizing the paper’s recent cuts on social media, and also described a similar magnitude of climate job losses.

It is probably best not to pinpoint a precise number of climate journalism job losses at the Post. Journalists frequently collaborate with other desks, or change beats. A journalist may cover climate half of the time, and other topics the rest of the time. Graphics, photo, video, and design focused journalists may specialize in climate change work, but get pulled onto other projects regularly. Still, based on the evidence above — as well as a bevy of social media posts I’ve seen from reporters directly saying they were laid off — I think it’s fair to say climate change coverage took a major hit in this round of layoffs.

I reached out to the Post Futures department editor Zachary Goldfarb and deputy editor Juliet Eilperin (both strong devotees of climate change coverage), for additional confirmation or comments. Please note that these were formerly my bosses; I only departed from the paper a little over a year and a half ago and am, still, pretty close to this story. (I figured that nonetheless, and especially given my deep investment in climate journalism and communication, it was better to write what I know, rather than to write nothing at all.)

In response, a Washington Post spokesperson sent the following statement: “The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company. These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”

Kaplan stressed she is not naïve about the Post’s finances, but struggled to understand the cuts in light of the team’s success. “Unquestionably our coverage was suffering from the same systemic problems that affected traffic and audiences to the rest of the newspaper and other journalism outlets,” she said. “But we were still holding our own, and we were considered a highly successful corner of the newsroom.”

It was only in late 2022 that the paper announced a dramatic expansion to “more than 30” journalists focused on climate. But when you combine together subsequent buyouts, retirements, departures to places like the New York Times, and now these major layoffs, this ramp-up appears to have been largely reversed. Was the initial expansion justified? Well, read the work. Since winning the Pulitzer in 2020, the Post climate team, or at least subsets of its reporters, were Pulitzer finalists two additional times (in 2022 and 2025, both times in the national reporting category). Last year, meanwhile, the team unveiled another major data journalism series on extreme rainfall, which was very high caliber and likely an award contender too.

In his remarks to the newsroom on the severe cuts, executive editor Matt Murray listed climate change as an area where the paper’s coverage had been able to “demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact and that resonate with readers.” These were the areas, Murray said, where the Post would now focus. But reporters are bewildered about what this will look like after such enormous reductions, not just to climate reporting itself but to video, design, and photojournalism, all of which go into the mix of the most significant and impactful stories.

So why is the Post doing this? Wasn’t there another, better way?

Other Post alums, like Marty Baron, former “The Fact checker” column writer Glenn Kessler, and former political reporter Ashley Parker and former columnist Ruth Marcus have written impassioned posts and in depth articles alike about what is going on. Why the paper tumbled so far so fast, and the inscrutable role of Jeff Bezos in it all. I witnessed a part of this from the inside up through mid-2024, but, I suspect, not the most important parts. I have nothing profound to add that goes beyond the voices above. But I feel confident in saying this one thing, and it is really everything: None of this tragedy should be blamed on the working reporters, who were doing the jobs they were hired to do, and for the most part, doing them very well.

The shrinking climate beat

This is all, sadly, part of a bigger picture. Two of them, actually.

First, the volume of climate change coverage in the top 5 U.S. newspapers (including the Post) appears to show a recent decline. That’s according to a dataset compiled by the Media and Climate Change Observatory based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which counts any article mentioning “climate change” or “global warming.”

I’ve written about these data before, but I decided to do some more work to clarify the picture. Here’s what the MECCO dataset looks like if you fit a 12 month moving average to the total monthly amount of coverage in the five papers.

Coverage is punctuated by bursts of attention to late-year international climate conferences, but the recent decline persists even when you smooth that out. And it appears poised to continue. The real question is how far coverage can fall.

There’s no way to identify an optimum number of climate stories that should be published, or an optimum number of journalists who should be employed writing them at national papers. But, the Earth has warmed by nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in just a century and a half, with much more warming still in store, causing major impacts already. And the climate story is simultaneously an energy, environment, agriculture, weather, tech, health, politics, and international relations story. This surely justifies organizing it as a significant beat in its own right.

I understand there is a lot of news right now, and a lot to compete with. But as I’ve stated before, nothing fundamental has changed recently with the science of climate change, or the nature of the problem. It therefore remains hard to understand what appears to be such a sudden reversal of emphasis and interest in some quarters of the media. Can climate journalism be better? Always. I have a number of thoughts on this that I’m hoping to write in the future, but that’s a discussion for another day.

No, newspapers are not like Blockbuster Video

Meanwhile, the loss of 300 journalists (and it is not clear how many other staff) also represents a major event for the decline of newspapers in general. The Post reporters let go represent about a third of a percent of all remaining newspaper employees in the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which put that figure at 80,600 jobs in November of this year.

Overall, 2025 is showing a yet another substantial decline in newspaper employees in the U.S. And this is before taking into account these latest Post losses, or the total closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or 50 recently announced job cuts at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Note: This graphic was updated with data for Dec 2025 after this article was originally published, and will continue to be updated. I more fully explore total 2025 newspaper job losses here.)

And here’s the broader picture, going all the way back to 1990 in the data, and comparing newspapers to other print publishing industries: (Note: This graphic was also updated with data for Dec 2025 after this article was originally published, and will continue to be updated.)

We all know the story by now: The changes charted above were driven by the rise of the Internet, by its gobbling up of print advertising. This shrank newspapers’ revenues and caused them to cut back on various forms of specialized journalism, international reporting, and more.

But looking back, it really seems like that was just the first blow. Next came social media, which has increasingly become the primary source of news for many, including for a younger audience, many of whom never really had the tactile experience of reading the paper.

And now comes AI. “Our organic search has fallen by nearly half in the last three years,” Murray told the Post newsroom this week in announcing the layoffs. Embedded in search engines, large language models are summarizing stuff for people who no longer go to the source. In many cases, the source that used to be the newspaper.

All of these hit revenues for newspaper journalism: The ad money, the web traffic from social media, the traffic from search engines.

But isn’t change good? Don’t we have access to more information than ever? Hasn’t social media empowered a new generation of hybrid creator-journalists who are reaching audiences as never before through video, podcasts, and more?

Certainly there is high quality online-only publishing of various kinds. In my world, consider Mongabay or Inside Climate News. But none have the scale or funding to reconstitute a newsroom with the hundreds of decades (or more?) of combined experience of the Washington Post when I arrived in 2014. None can stop everything, and put five or ten reporters on a plane to go cover a breaking story.

Then there’s social media. There are the influencers and Substackers who are serving real, significant audiences in this space. The web abounds with information and analysis, some of it incisive and new and important; but there’s also little quality control, and plenty of falsehood. The standards for vetting information found at a place like the Post just aren’t present, though some may practice them individually. In particular, in these venues, opinion and quick takes tend to thrive, but dedicated reporting is something else again. It is a bigger lift, a bigger time commitment. To do it well, you need infrastructure and financial backing.

And then there are the AI tools. They produce information that sounds believable, and often really is. But once again, an LLM does not have the accuracy, verification, or accountability standards practiced at outlets like the Post. And it certainly does not have the journalistic judgement. It can summarize existing journalistic content, but it cannot tell you the next story to cover.

And none of these sources or technologies provide the communal, shared information streams that newspapers once did.

When I post charts about newspaper job losses on Facebook, I sometimes see comparisons in the comments between newspapers and VHS tapes, or DVDs, or vinyl records or something. Har har. It’s just change, some say, and you can’t stop it. It’s an outdated technology.

I’m not naive. I don’t think we can go back to a world in which print newspapers dominate the media. There’s a key difference, though, between The Washington Post and Blockbuster Video. Newspapers serve a civic purpose, and it is not so clear that whatever is replacing them is replacing that.

So we must strive to ensure the core values of newspaper reporting persist, and that shared news sources for communities and nations continue to thrive. I’m in the university world now, which can help: By helping students produce quality journalism that newspapers can run, for instance, universities can in effect extend their staffing and capacity. (For a great example, see here.)

In the end, I’m crushed for my former colleagues who lost their jobs this week. You can donate here to help them in their transitions. In the longer term, we must find a way to channel all of this recently unmoored experience and knowledge back into new forms of journalism that will work in a very different age.

Clarification: I updated this post to note that the New York Times had a climate unit within its Science section even prior to its forming of an independent climate team in 2017, and to better underscore that the major papers had certainly covered climate change before the era of growing focus in the late 2010s/early 2020s. This is, of course, also apparent in the first chart above.