On Wednesday, The Washington Post laid off one-third of its newsroom staff, a cost-cutting measure in part provoked by a massive subscriber exodus from the paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That exodus was prompted by owner Jeff Bezos’s decision, going against longstanding tradition, to kill the Post editorial board’s endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and announce a new policy of non-endorsement—a blatant attempt to curry favor with Donald Trump. If readership means anything to those in charge at the Post, that decision backfired.
I checked in yesterday with Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department co-author Aaron C. Davis — Carol Leonnig had already left the paper for MS NOW — who told me that, fortunately, he and his team were not among the hundreds who were let go, though he called it “the saddest day of my eighteen years at the Post.”
As discussed in my Ink Book Club conversation with Anand on Wednesday, the staff of Book World, the paper’s book review section, was not so lucky. Post management decided to shutter the department, one of the country’s few remaining book review sections that was published as a separate Sunday broadsheet, in addition to their digital coverage. Eight of its nine staffers were let go — the lone remaining editor was reassigned — and many, if not all, of its already assigned reviews were scrapped. Reviewers I’ve spoken to who had outstanding assignments were not offered a kill fee. Ron Charles — who has been the Washington Post’s book critic for upwards of twenty years — was among those who got the boot, despite the popularity of his Book Club newsletter and his beloved series, “Totally Hip Video Book Review.” (He’s now launched a newsletter on Substack.)
I have been a regular reviewer for The Washington Post for the last three years, since leaving my position as vice president of books for O, the Oprah Magazine and director of Oprah’s Book Club. All my colleagues at O were similarly let go when the print version of the magazine was shut down in 2021 amid Covid. I survived the transition to digital only for two years, during which our previously fulsome review coverage was winnowed down to listicles and other SEO-driven content, and in November of 2022, the week before Thanksgiving, I was told by a newly installed editorial director I’d barely met—along with an HR rep— that the platform was “going in a different direction.”
Reviewing books for the Post brought me full circle. In 1976, while an undergraduate at The George Washington University, I stumbled into a job as a copy aide for the Book World section of the Post. I had dreamt of becoming a journalist since seeing the movie All the President’s Men, so this couldn’t have been a luckier turn of fate. I’d been an avid reader since childhood, so to discover that there was an entire industry devoted to the creation of books was a revelation, and one that enabled an exciting career making a living doing something I loved— publicizing, acquiring, editing, and covering books.
I write this with enormous sadness over what is happening to The Washington Post under Bezos, and more broadly, under Trump—and a growing righteous anger. I do believe that the paper’s news coverage will remain robust, and we need those dedicated journalists now more than ever. But for now, books coverage there is dead, an irony, as Anand pointed out the other day, as Bezos made his bones selling books via Amazon. But billionaires like Bezos and others no longer feel a need to be performative. They have been infected with Trump’s shamelessness. In the end, Book World is yet another victim of their insatiable greed and callousness.
The demise of Book World — and the budget cuts being suffered by the few other papers that still offer extensive literary coverage —will be felt by authors, publishers, and the reading public. But platforms like The Ink will double down in their support of this vital form.
Take that, Bezos!
And for Book Club members, we present our February pick…
