Jeff Bezos era (since 2013)
In August 2013, Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and other local publications, websites, and real estate for US$250 million, transferring ownership to Nash Holdings LLC, Bezos's private investment company. The paper's former parent company, which retained some other assets such as Kaplan and a group of TV stations, was renamed Graham Holdings shortly after the sale.
Nash Holdings, which includes the Post, is operated separately from technology company Amazon, which Bezos founded and where he is as of 2022 executive chairman and the largest single shareholder, with 12.7% of voting rights.
Bezos said he has a vision that recreates "the 'daily ritual' of reading the Post as a bundle, not merely a series of individual stories..." He has been described as a "hands-off owner", holding teleconference calls with executive editor Martin Baron every two weeks. Bezos appointed Fred Ryan (founder and CEO of Politico) to serve as publisher and chief executive officer. This signaled Bezos' intent to shift the Post to a more digital focus with a national and global readership.
In 2015, the Post moved from the building it owned at 1150 15th Street to a leased space three blocks away at One Franklin Square on K Street. Since 2014 the Post has launched an online personal finance section, a blog, and a podcast with a retro theme. The Post won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for News & Politics in the Social and Web categories.
In 2017, the newspaper hired Jamal Khashoggi as a columnist. In 2018, Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul.
In 2018, Monica Hesse was appointed the paper's first ever gender columnist. 17 days later, the Post published "Why can’t we hate men?", a #MeToo-inspired op-ed written by Suzanna Danuta Walters, the director of women’s studies at Northeastern University. Some media outlets objected to it, including The Atlantic, the American Enterprise Institute, The National Review, Quillette, and The Washington Post itself. Six months after Hesse's appointment, the Post published Amber Heard's op-ed, "I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change." This article ultimately led to a lawsuit filed in 2019 by Johnny Depp against Amber Heard for defamation. After a 7-week jury trial, Heard was found liable for defaming Depp, who received $15 million in damages.
In October 2023, the Post announced it would cut 240 jobs across the organization by offering voluntary separation packages to employees. In a staff-wide email announcing the job cuts, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer wrote, "Our prior projections for traffic, subscriptions and advertising growth for the past two years — and into 2024 — have been overly optimistic". The Post has lost around 500,000 subscribers since the end of 2020 and was set to lose $100 million in 2023, according to The New York Times. The layoffs prompted Dan Froomkin of Presswatchers to suggest that the decline in readership could be reversed by focusing on the rise of authoritarianism (in a fashion similar to the role the Post played during the Watergate scandal) instead of staying strictly neutral, which Froomkin says places the paper into an undistinguished secondary role in competition with other contemporary media. As part of the shift in tone, in 2023 the paper closed down the "KidsPost" column for children, the "Skywatch" astronomy column, and the "John Kelly's Washington" column about local history and sights, which had been running under different bylines since 1947. KidsPost subsequently returned in 2025.
In May 2024, CEO and publisher William Lewis announced that the organization would embrace artificial intelligence to improve the paper's financial situation, telling staff it would seek "AI everywhere in our newsroom."
In June 2024, Axios reported the Post faced significant internal turmoil and financial challenges. Lewis quickly generated controversy with his leadership style and proposed restructuring plans. The abrupt departure of executive editor Sally Buzbee and the appointment of two white men to top editorial positions sparked internal discontent, particularly given the lack of consideration for the Post's senior female editors. Additionally, Lewis' proposed division for social media and service journalism was met with resistance from staff. Reports alleging Lewis' attempts to influence editorial decisions, including pressuring Buzbee to drop a story about his past ties to a UK phone hacking scandal, and offering NPR's media correspondent an exclusive interview about the Post's future in exchange for not publishing similar allegations, further impacted the newsroom's morale. Staffers also became worried about Lewis' drinking and uninvolved role in the newsroom. Lewis continued to grapple with declining revenue and readership, and sought strategies to regain subscribers lost since the Trump era.
Later that month, the paper ran a story allegedly exposing a connection between incoming editor Robert Winnett and John Ford, a man who "admitted to an extensive career using deception and illegal means to obtain confidential information." Winnett withdrew from the position shortly thereafter. In January 2025, the Post announced it will layoff 4% of its staff, less than 100 people. Newsroom employees will not be affected.
Also in January 2025, the Post scrapped the paper's "gender columnist" role and reassigned Hesse from the Style/Power section to the Opinions section after Post editors rejected an article she recently submitted. This change was confirmed by Hesse herself in an article she wrote in March 2025.
In June 2025, the Post announced the upcoming launch of Ripple, a section of the Post's website that will allow columnists and non-professional writers from various newspapers and blogs to write opinion pieces. Non-professional writers will be allowed to use Ember, an AI tool created by the Post to help them write articles.
On January 14, 2026, as part of the court case United States v. Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, the FBI raided the apartment of a Post journalist, Hannah Natanson, and seized her phone, two laptops, and a smartwatch. Investigators said to Natanson that the focus of the probe was not her but Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator with top-secret security clearance, under investigation for taking home classified intelligence reports. The day after, the Post's editorial board called the search an "aggressive attack on the press freedom of all journalists".
On February 4, 2026, it was announced that around 300 Post employees would be laid off. The paper's sports and books coverage are expected to be closed entirely, and its local news coverage will be substantially cut. Additionally, their daily news "Post Reports" podcast, which ran for seven years, has been suspended. Several foreign bureaus were closed, and at least one correspondent in Ukraine was laid off. According to The New York Times, in the week following these job cuts, more than 60,000 readers cancelled their digital subscriptions. The layoffs were driven by a reported $100 million of losses in 2024, subscriber drops following the paper's refusal to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 US election, and falling search traffic from AI tools.
On February 7, 2026, it was announced that Will Lewis, the paper's publisher, would step down and be replaced in the interim by Jeff D'Onofrio, who served as the company's chief financial officer. The Washington Post Guild employees union welcomed the change in leadership, stating that Lewis will be remembered for "the attempted destruction of a great American journalism institution", and urged Bezos to "sell the paper to someone willing to invest in its future".
In February 2025, Bezos announced that the opinion section of the Post would publish only pieces that support "personal liberties and free markets". David Shipley, The Post's opinion editor, resigned after failing to persuade Bezos to reconsider. Within two days of the announcement, it was reported that more than 75,000 digital subscribers had canceled their subscriptions. The following month, publisher Will Lewis killed a column by opinion columnist and editor Ruth Marcus criticizing the new direction. Marcus resigned, ending her 40-year tenure with the newspaper.
After the killing of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the Post fired columnist and founding global opinion editor Karen Attiah, citing violations of its social media policy. Attiah said she was punished for "speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America's apathy toward guns", arguing the US "accepts and worships" gun violence. Politico noted that only one post mentioned Kirk; it referred to his statement that Black women "do not have the brain processing power" to be taken seriously. Attiah said her posts "made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them", and described being pushed out after 11 years of service "for doing my job as a journalist" as a deeply "cruel 180". She was the last Black full-time writer at the opinion desk.
On July 31, 2026, opinion editor Adam O'Neal, who was hired the previous year, announced his resignation, effective August 31. He did not state a reason for his departure.