Washington Post Nears Breakeven After 'Hundreds of Millions' in Losses

The Washington Post is "within striking distance of break-even" after years of losses its executive editor pegged at "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars." Matt Murray, speaking at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, said he expects next year to be the paper's best in seven and projected the publisher could turn a corner in 2027.

The commercial numbers back the claim. Direct advertising sales posted their strongest year-over-year growth since 2021 in the third quarter, and programmatic revenue rose 48% year over year as of September, according to a company spokesperson.

The newsroom is hiring again. Recent additions include James Politi from the Financial Times, Nancy Cook from Bloomberg and Ian Ward from Politico.

What did the layoffs accomplish?

Murray framed this year as an effort to close out "five years of turmoil" at the paper.

"The layoffs were terrible, but they were a kind of climax to a long stretch of buyouts and staff turnover," he told Mark Stenberg in an interview for the On Background newsletter. "We hoped they would punctuate it, and that seems to be what happened."

The rest of the year, he said, focused on "stability, core coverage, and breaking scoops."

Murray arrived two and a half years ago, recruited by former publisher Will Lewis, who left in February after controversy. He said the paper faced "deep-seated challenges" in organization and audience understanding, with too much of the newsroom still oriented toward print and weak data. His assessment of successor Jeff D'Onofrio: "Jeff brings a low-drama, data-oriented focus on fundamentals. He's very calm. He's about the journalism, but he knows he's not a journalist."

Where will growth come from?

Murray's answer is generational. The Post grew from roughly 35,000 subscriptions before Trump to 3 million during the Trump bump, but he argued the next audience is different.

"This is the first time in my lifetime that the boomers are receding and the next generations are rising," he said. "That's the audience we want for news."

On the product side, The Post suspended its daily podcast because costs overran revenue, but is now reviving it with an ad-sales operation that includes a partnership with Acast. Advice columnist Carolyn Hax has launched a podcast that is "taking off quickly," and personal finance reporter Michelle Singletary has one too. Murray said at least half a dozen staff writers could find a "sweet spot of newsletter, podcast, and writing."

On comparisons with The New York Times' acquisition strategy, including its reported interest in Letterboxd, Murray was blunt: "In the long run, we probably need our version of that model, with the journalism at the center. But we're still getting the Post itself where it needs to be."

The Post is also relaunching the Ben Bradlee award for outstanding reporting. It goes Tuesday to Hannah Natanson, whose home the FBI raided in January, and the paper will recognize photojournalist Heidi Levine, attacked by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank last month.

City Cast changes CEOs

City Cast cofounder and chief executive David Plotz is stepping away from the nationwide network of city-based podcasts after six years. Cofounder and former chief creative officer Andi McDaniel becomes CEO. The company, which was generating around $5 million last October but had not reached profitability, has been shuttering some markets and expanding others.

Backer Graham Holdings, which also owns Slate, appears to be doing end-of-year housekeeping. Slate named editor in chief Hillary Frey as CEO in late October, replacing Dan Check, then laid off a small number of staff last week. Graham Holdings president and CEO Timothy J. O'Shaughnessy admitted in a 2023 shareholders letter that the company "overpaid" for Leaf Group, bought for $348 million and shuttered in 2025. "I screwed this one up," he wrote.

AP signs Anthropic and grows elections revenue

The Associated Press struck a content licensing agreement with Anthropic, the first of its kind for the AI firm, and grew elections revenue by more than 80% compared with the 2022 midterms. The AP drew over 23 million pageviews, its highest traffic since the 2024 election and a sixfold increase over election night 2022.

Morning Brew Inc. hired New York Times veteran Nina Lassam as its first senior vice president of multimedia, CEO Robert Dippell announced on LinkedIn. Lassam spent nearly a decade at The Times building its audio and video operations.

How Le Monde landed its OpenAI deal

Le Monde CEO Louis Dreyfus, also speaking at Web Summit, revealed his OpenAI licensing deal began with him raising his hand at a Sam Altman talk at Station F in fall 2023. "Seventy-five percent of my revenue comes from readers. You need reliable data, and you give it to users for free. If you want Le Monde to keep publishing reliable news, we need to negotiate," he told Altman. A deal followed three months later.

The partnerships deliver "a significant and sustainable revenue stream" and a new audience that converts to subscriptions at higher rates than Facebook referrals, Dreyfus said. He redistributes a share of the licensing revenue to the newsroom, so every journalist gets an annual bonus from it.

Le Monde has grown from around 310 journalists to nearly 600 under Dreyfus, with 720,000 subscribers, 620,000 of them digital-only. It has also signed deals with Perplexity and Meta, though French AI unicorn Mistral refuses to license. Dreyfus predicted Anthropic-style holdouts will change as they face investors asking "whether their data is stolen or legitimate."

Google's AI Overviews launched in France in mid-July without denting Le Monde's audience. British publishers report the same for general news, with traffic losses concentrated in evergreen food, automotive and consumer-electronics content — a distinction that will shape how publishers weigh the AI search threat.