Money is pouring in for workers impacted by Wednesday’s layoffs at The Washington Post.
As of Thursday morning, about 3,000 supporters had donated more than $350,000 combined to a GoFundMe page set up for let-go journalists.
The fundraising push, launched just a few hours after company executives began cutting workers, was set up by Post reporter Rachel Siegel and the newsroom’s union. One of its top donors, tech journalist and former Post employee Kara Swisher, gave $10,000.
Swisher, who recently made a push to buy the Post from its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, wrote on Threads that she had the means to “donate a decent chunk of dough to these hardworking employees,” and urged others to follow.
Other top donors appeared to be former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron and ex-staffers like Eugene Robinson and Fred Barbash.
The Post’s haul, and the speed at which it drew in six figures, make it an outlier among media layoff fundraisers. Laid-off staffers at Vox Media pulled in about $7,000 in their January GoFundMe, while Teen Vogue got about $41,000 after November layoffs.
“Post Guild members have come together to support their colleagues with this GoFundMe,” said a spokesperson for the Washington Baltimore News Guild, which represents the paper’s union. The spokesperson blamed “inexcusable business decisions of top Post leadership” for the cuts.
“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,” a Post spokesperson said in a statement on the layoffs. “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.”
As donations flooded in, others in the media industry offered career support. Executives at the platforms Substack and Beehiiv posted on X (formerly Twitter) that they’re offering fee waivers and training for any Post reporters who took the leap to go independent, for example.
The Post’s layoffs, which its newsroom union said impacted hundreds of workers, were designed to trim costs and refocus its efforts around a smaller set of coverage areas, executive editor Matt Murray told employees over Zoom on Wednesday morning.
The company is shutting down its podcast, “Post Reports,” and letting go of journalists focused on sports, books, and foreign affairs. It’s restructuring its D.C. metro coverage, and investing in areas like politics and national security that “demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” Murray wrote in a memo to staff, viewed by Business Insider.
“Today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what has become a more crowded, competitive, and complicated media landscape,” Murray told staffers during the call. “For too long, we’ve operated with a structure that’s too rooted in the days when we were a quasi-monopoly local newspaper.”
This story has been updated with the most recent figures on the amount raised.
