The news: The Washington Post is making the deepest cuts in its history, laying off roughly 30% of its newsroom as financial pressure, subscription erosion, and collapsing search traffic force a major retrenchment.

The reductions underscore how generative AI–driven changes to discovery are accelerating divergence among legacy news publishers, even at the top end of the market.

• The Post is cutting more than 300 journalists, scaling back sports, local, and international coverage, shuttering standalone sports and books sections, and ending the daily Post Reports podcast, per The New York Times.
• Leadership cited sustained losses, declining subscriptions, and a nearly 50% drop in search-driven traffic over the past three years, partly attributed to generative AI’s impact on discovery.
• The paper also canceled plans to send reporters to cover the 2026 Winter Olympics, reversing a long-standing commitment to global event coverage weeks before the Games.

Compare and contrast: The cuts stand in contrast to The New York Times, which added 1.4 million digital-only subscribers in 2025, reached 12.78 million total subscribers, and posted double-digit YoY growth in digital subscriptions and digital ad revenues, per its Q4 and FY25 earnings release Wednesday.

Why it matters: The widening gap between The Post and The Times highlights how uneven (and unforgiving) the recovery remains for legacy news publishers. Scale and brand recognition hardly guarantees stability.

Our forecasts suggest structural headwinds remain severe:

• US print newspaper ad spending is forecast to fall from $2.97 billion in 2025 to $1.79 billion by 2029; a Mediaocean report found only 6% of marketing professionals planned to increase print spending, by far the lowest out of any category surveyed.