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Despite the financial bleeding, D’Onofrio attempted to rally staff.
“Bear with me, because that will take some time and obvious care, but I’m keen to get going on it,” he said.
“And we are going to go after it, and we’re going to go after it hard, because we owe it to this place to do that,” he said.
Those words may sound determined, but the underlying data paints a sobering picture.
The Post’s total number of published stories has fallen 42 percent since 2020. At the same time, operating costs have climbed 16 percent over the past five years. Fewer stories. Higher expenses. Declining traffic. That is not a formula for sustainability in today’s brutal digital media environment.
The struggles extend beyond accounting spreadsheets. Speaking Wednesday, executive editor Matt Murray acknowledged the downward trend publicly.
“The reality is that the Post had been facing some decline for quite some time,” he said.
“The data really demonstrated that.”
Murray further admitted that subscription numbers have “wane” over the past five years. During an interview at the Restoring Trust in Media Summit in Washington, he explained how pandemic-era growth created a distorted sense of security.
The paper expanded aggressively during COVID, when news consumption surged nationwide. But once the pandemic subsided, audience engagement cooled dramatically — while payroll remained bloated.
“When COVID faded and news consumption started to drop again, our costs [had] gone high, but our consumption went back down,” Murray said.
In other words, the newsroom built itself for a temporary spike that did not last.
The Post also revealed that search traffic has been cut in half over a three-year period. In a digital era where Google referrals often determine survival, losing half of that pipeline is devastating. Fewer clicks mean fewer subscribers. Fewer subscribers mean fewer dollars. The cycle becomes difficult to reverse.
Adding to the turmoil, Murray admitted that “morale has been a challenge at the Post for a while.”
That may be the most telling line of all.
Media insiders have long whispered about tension inside legacy newsrooms grappling with shrinking audiences, cultural shifts, and growing distrust from the public. Now, the Post’s own leadership is conceding what many readers have already concluded: the decline did not happen overnight.
The question now is whether one of America’s flagship newspapers can engineer a turnaround — or whether this is the beginning of a much steeper fall.
With losses exceeding a quarter-billion dollars across three years, subscriptions slipping, search traffic collapsing, and nearly half the workforce gone, the Washington Post faces a crossroads.
D’Onofrio says they are going to “go after it hard.” But turning around a legacy institution burdened by rising costs and shrinking trust will take more than motivational speeches.
For one of the nation’s most influential media brands, 2026 may prove to be a make-or-break year.
