Media Barons Are Cutting Back, but The Walrus Can’t Afford To

EVEN BY THE standards of an industry defined by brutal contractions, the cuts at the Washington Post shocked. Roughly one-third of its newsroom was wiped out, with more than 300 positions eliminated. Entire departments, including sports and books, were disbanded and foreign bureaus scaled back. The layoffs rank among the largest in American newspaper history, a grim distinction for one of the country’s most storied dailies.

The paper described the move as part of a “strategic reset.” There’s no reason to doubt that. Journalism has been a miserable racket for decades. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that owner Jeff Bezos, whose core business interests lie elsewhere, was trying to shrink an asset that had become a liability in the Donald Trump era. Bezos’s fix was cleaner than editorial diktats: when reporters disappear, entire lines of inconvenient inquiry vanish with them.

To the extent that dialling back the Post’s prominence and political bite can be read as risk management, one wonders if smaller institutions are making similar calculations. You don’t need a billionaire breathing down your neck to start second-guessing; our polarized times supply enough pressure. The best and bravest commissioning is often adversarial. You want to dig up something that someone, somewhere, would prefer to keep buried. But that kind of risk—reputational, financial—is easy to rationalize away. In poker, you never lose a hand you don’t play; and in journalism, there’s no jeopardy in turning down a difficult pitch, or passing on a story that might provoke a powerful actor. Choosing safety has serious upside: fewer lawsuits, far less blowback, and a lot less to answer for. The decision leaves no mark.

• What’s a Walrus? A Beast, Actually
• Was Chris Alexander Fed False Intel about a So-Called Russian Asset?
• Publishing Can’t Quit Its Obsession with Buzzy Stories

One of the things I want us to do at The Walrus is very much leave a mark. Shrinking newsrooms don’t just reduce coverage; they narrow reality itself. That’s the thinking underpinning our new regional bureaus, our expanded international reporting, our renewed focus on sovereignty and defence. You can see the fruits of that strategy in this issue, from a lucid analysis of Canada’s entanglement with Trump’s Golden Dome to a deeply reported piece on the crisis in Sudan to an essay on the outsized grief tiny communities like Tumbler Ridge carry after tragedy. We are deliberately creating more points of contact—across geographies, reporters, beats—where uncomfortable facts can surface.

If Bezos’s model treats journalism as a burden to be minimized, we see it as an obligation to be invested in. It’s about pushing our line of sight outward and extending the perimeter of what can be tracked. It’s about choosing to look when it would be far easier not to.