Washington Post is laying off a third of its workforce across both the newsroom and its business

operations, a massive blow at a storied newspaper that has struggled in recent years to stay profitable

and retain subscribers. The cuts reportedly affect more than 300 of the approximately 800

journalists in the newsroom and include eliminating its sports desk and books section entirely.

The Post's executive editor said the changes, though painful, were meant to, quote, reinvent the paper for a new era.

For more on these cuts and their implications were joined now by Marty Barron, who was the editor of the Washington Post from 2012 until 2021.

Welcome back to the News Hour.

Thanks for having me.

You have described this as among the darkest days in the Post's history.

What do these layoffs mean for the paper's mission and its ability to continue doing in-depth substantial reporting.

Well, I think it's important to keep in mind just how widespread these cuts are,

not only the sports desk, the books department, but pretty much the entire arts department,

eviscerating the foreign staff, largely eviscerating the local staff as well.

So these are huge, huge cuts, and they're going to be, they're going to do enormous damage to the newspaper's ability to cover its community, to cover the country, and to cover the world in all the ways that it should.

The executive editor Matt Murray said today that the paper's structure was built

for a different era, and that refocusing on what he calls these core coverage areas like

politics and national security will help the post better navigate technological change,

shifting audience habits, cost pressures. Do you buy that argument?

Well, Matt, is doing a really good job as editor of The Post. The Post is doing extraordinary

journalism every single day, and I commend them for that. I admire what they're doing. That said,

they seem to have announced a new strategy just about once a year now, saying that it would better position themselves for the future.

And none of those things have worked.

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