Here are some photos of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez at Paris Fashion Week (this week). On Monday, they attended the Schiaparelli show. Bezos has grown a beard and I hate to admit this, but it’s a good look for him. He looks more distinguished. But then I usually like a beard. Beyond the beard, this is all a pretty terrible look though. By that I mean, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, is a pretty awful steward of one of the most respected newspapers in America. Bezos has owned the Washington Post for thirteen years. When he first bought it, he kept a respectful distance from its operations and editorial control. But something broke a few years ago when Bezos decided to use WaPo as his own personal propaganda machine, and not only that, he used WaPo as part of his suck-up campaign for Donald Trump. Bezos hired Will Lewis to run WaPo, and Lewis is a British guy who basically fled the UK media in a storm of hacking/criminal controversy. Lewis and Bezos have destroyed WaPo’s credibility and their stewardship has led directly to a massive decline in subscriptions and readership. Well, now massive layoffs are about to happen:

The Washington Post has consistently produced high-quality, news cycle-leading reporting over the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic and unpredictable second administration. But that work has been produced under a cloud of uncertainty and rumors of widespread job cuts.

Those long-rumored cuts now appear to be close, with staffers expecting the ax to drop in early February – though nothing is certain. Inside the Post, staffers have tossed around estimates of potential cuts, with most exceeding 100, which would represent more than 10% of the newsroom – but no one really knows how widespread the cuts will be – or in fact if they will happen at all. The sections most likely to be affected by the cuts include sports, metro and foreign, according to staffers who spoke with the Guardian.

On Sunday morning, members of the foreign staff, concerned that the section could be decimated by cuts, sent a letter to the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, urging him to change course and conveying the significance of international reporting for the institution – and for the public interest. Approximately 60 people signed the letter.

“We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance – not the shared success that remains attainable,” the staffers wrote in the letter, reviewed by the Guardian but first reported by the New York Times. The signatories, which included many of the paper’s most prominent international journalists, said they were open to “finding ways to reduce our costs even further” in discussion with management – “while retaining as many jobs as we can. We know what happens when newspapers slash their international sections: they lose reach and they lose relevance,” the staffers wrote.

On Friday night, in one of the first tangible actions suggesting how dire the paper’s financial situation might be, the managing editor, Kimi Yoshino, sent a memo to the sports department informing them that the Post would not be sending anyone to Italy to cover the upcoming Winter Olympics. “We realize this decision and its timing will be disappointing to many of you,” Yoshino wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Guardian. (The Post had already spent about $80,000 on accommodations, according to the Times, making the decision even more baffling for some at the paper.)

“It’s all very confusing and no one knows anything,” said one Post staffer who was not authorized to comment. “The anxiety is so sad.”

[From The Guardian]

The announcement about WaPo’s lack of Olympic coverage landed with a thud in media circles. While the advance hype around the Winter Olympics this year has been pretty muted, American sports media LOVES to cover the Olympic Games. American interest in the Olympics factors into so many decisions made by the International Olympic Committee because the American media market is so big and powerful. It’s horrible that one of the biggest newspapers in America has decided that they’re not sending *anyone* to Italy. But hey, at least WaPo’s owner and his golddigger wife jetted off to Paris for fashion week, huh?

A top Post reporter tells me "there's now a strong sense" across the newsroom "that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post." pic.twitter.com/ORtFdFmWbD

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 26, 2026

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.