AI Is Hungry—and Journalism Is Dinner: Washington Post Announces Mass Layoffs

 

When AI enters the newsroom, nothing is sacred. Sports, books, foreign wars, local lives—all disposable. What survives is power-friendly content and a public kept blind by design.

I read the news about The Washington Post the way you read an obituary for someone who is still breathing. One-third of the workforce gone. Sports and books tossed aside like yesterday’s paper. Foreign desks hollowed out. Metro gutted. The official language was calm, corporate, antiseptic. Focus. Stability. Reinvention. But behind that language I heard a familiar sound. The low, wet chewing of a machine that never gets full.

This is not just about layoffs. This is about appetite. Artificial intelligence is a digital glutton, and it does not nibble. It inhales. Jobs, industries, traditions, craft, context, memory. It eats the margins first, then the center, then the soul. The sports desk and the book section are not random casualties. They are the organs that take time, judgment, and lived experience. AI hates time. It hates patience. It hates anything that cannot be scraped, summarized, and monetized at scale. When the forest is gone, the termites still ask for more wood.

The publisher says the paper must focus on national news and politics. That sounds noble until you hear what is missing. Sports connects cities. Books shape minds. Foreign reporting explains the world beyond our borders. Metro tells you who you are and where you live. Strip those away and you do not get sharper journalism. You get a thinner product optimized for clicks, rage, and algorithmic churn. You get a paper that sounds important but knows less and less about the world it claims to explain.

Executive editor Matt Murray said the traffic has plummeted in the last 3 years amid the AI boom. That sentence matters. It admits the quiet truth. Readers are not leaving because journalism suddenly forgot how to report. Readers are leaving because AI floods the internet with cheap summaries, auto-written explainers, and synthetic certainty. When everything looks like news, nothing feels necessary. The machine does not care if it replaces truth with plausibility. It only cares if you scroll.

I think about the foreign correspondents who begged to keep their jobs. The Cairo bureau chief laid off alongside the entire Middle East roster. A correspondent in Ukraine losing her job while still inside a war zone. That is not trimming fat. That is cutting muscle and bone. AI cannot smell a street after an explosion. It cannot read fear in a mother’s eyes. It cannot tell you when silence means more than a quote. Those things do not scale. So they get cut.

Former editor Marty Baron called this one of the darkest days in the paper’s history. He knows what darkness looks like. He led the newsroom through investigations that mattered, through political pressure, through an era when facts were under siege. He remembers when journalism was expensive because democracy was expensive. Now we are told democracy must be cost-efficient. A cheap lock invites a thief.

Ownership always matters. Jeff Bezos bought the paper for $250m in 2013 and once spoke eloquently about the need for a free press. He built a retail empire by perfecting logistics, automation, and ruthless efficiency. That same DNA now shadows the newsroom. Warehouses without workers. Delivery without drivers. Content without journalists. It is not personal. It is structural. AI is the ultimate warehouse manager. It does not sleep. It does not unionize. It does not complain when you erase entire sections of a 150-year-old institution.

The irony cuts deep when you compare this collapse with The New York Times, which added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025. That is not an accident. The Times invested heavily in depth, games, cooking, audio, and global reporting. It treated journalism as a product worth paying for, not a cost to be minimized. One paper fed its readers. The other tried to out-starve the algorithm and lost.

AI defenders say this is progress. They say machines free humans for higher work. I have heard that song before. In the 1980s, factory automation promised better jobs. Instead, entire towns hollowed out. In the 2000s, digital advertising promised sustainable journalism. Instead, Craigslist gutted classified revenue, and Facebook siphoned attention. In 2010, algorithmic feeds promised personalization. Instead, they delivered polarization. The pattern is clear. Technology promises abundance, then concentrates power, then calls the wreckage efficiency. When the horse throws you, the saddle still wants credit.

Sports and books being scrapped tells you everything. Sports writing is not just scores. It is history, rivalry, failure, redemption. Books are not just reviews. They are arguments with the dead and conversations with the unborn. AI can summarize a novel in 200 words, but it cannot tell you why a sentence ruins your sleep. It can list stats, but it cannot explain why a loss still hurts 20 years later. Those sections are being sacrificed because their value is human, not algorithmic.

The Washington Post Guild warned that cutting workers would weaken the paper and drive readers away. That warning will age well. You cannot shrink your way into relevance. You cannot automate trust. You cannot replace reporters with prompts and expect loyalty. Readers know when a paper is written by people who live in the world versus systems trained on the leftovers of yesterday’s reporting.

I write this because this is personal. I am a professor and a writer. I am a reader too. When a major newspaper decides the world is too expensive to cover, the cost does not disappear. It gets paid later, in ignorance, in confusion, in policy built on half-knowledge. AI does not care about that bill. It will be long gone, chasing the next dataset, the next disruption, the next mouthful.

This moment is not unique. It is a signal. AI is not just coming for factory floors or customer service lines. It is coming for culture. For memory. For institutions that take time to build and seconds to dismantle. The sports desk and the book section are early casualties because they remind us that life is more than politics and breaking alerts. A machine that wants everything must first erase what slows it down.

The Washington Post says these steps will strengthen its footing. Maybe in the short term. Maybe the balance sheet breathes easier. But journalism is not just a business. It is a public good that survives on credibility. Once that is gone, no algorithm can synthesize it back. You cannot replant a forest with sawdust.

AI will keep eating. That is what gluttons do. The question is not whether it will stop. The question is what we are willing to lose before we admit that something essential is being swallowed whole.

 

 

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