Journalists Must Take Responsibility For Our Own Future Into Our Own Hands

Today, there has been a flood of posts about The Washington Post.
The news that a third of its staff is being laid off and many offices closed (including the one in Ukraine) caught many people off guard. A lot of blame is being directed at the owner, Jeff Bezos.
I once had the honor of writing op-eds for The Washington Post. That year gave me a powerful platform and the chance to tell the world about my country. I’m proud of the experience and deeply grateful for the people I met there — many of whom will remain in my heart forever.

Still, as painful as it is to watch this media institution collapse today, I feel I already went through these dark emotions back in 2024. The Washington Post had been struggling with serious, structural problems for a long time — problems that were quietly leading it to this moment.
Today’s events may not even be the worst chapter. I cannot place all the blame on Jeff Bezos alone. Perhaps the sellers who agreed to hand the newspaper over to an oligarch bear even greater responsibility.
As someone from Ukraine — where most major media outlets have long been owned by oligarchs — I never expected that big businessman would be willing to subsidize a money-losing operation forever. That’s simply not how it works.
Today, the funding crisis haunts many media organizations. The shift driven by social media, changing patterns of information consumption, widespread disillusionment with the current ideological landscape, and the flood of disinformation — these are enormous challenges that even giants like The Washington Post have struggled to overcome.
The result: shrinking subscriptions and desperate attempts to find new revenue.
Some outlets have managed to adapt. The Washington Post, unfortunately, is not among them.
The New York Times, for example, has aggressively pursued “non-news” revenue streams and built additional resources (even if its situation is far from perfect). Years ago, the Times organized global tours led by its star writers, whose audiences number in the millions. Their cooking app still drives people wild. Few remember that the Times launched three apps — two of which failed — yet they kept experimenting and searching for new paths.
The Washington Post didn’t just fail to find those paths. There was another critical problem: too many people inside the profession chose to close their eyes to the warning signs that were leading straight to collapse.
My own collaboration with the Post ended when they decided to stop working with non-staff writers. They concluded that opinion pieces should only come from people physically based in Washington. With great sadness, I read pieces that bore no relation to reality, written by people who didn’t truly understand the places and events they were describing.
I knew dozens of writers around the world — people like me — who were quietly pushed aside. Later, a well-known journalist friend of mine spent months trying to get a single blog published there. It was deeply disappointing.
Then came the decision to offer paid early retirement to a large group of veteran employees approaching pension age — in effect, a staff reduction disguised as generosity. Among them were names respected worldwide. At the time, people were scared and hurt. Those moves weren’t journalistic decisions, nor smart business ones.
I said openly that the Post would lose far more money than it saved. Sure enough, by the end of that year, headlines announced the Post had lost $100 million.
Yet even then, many of those who are disappointed today spent months justifying every decision and pretending the problems didn’t exist — like children who cover their eyes and believe no one can see them. The problems never went away. The organization simply kept hoping an oligarch would keep writing checks indefinitely.
As a Ukrainian journalist, I know how to produce quality content at a fraction of the cost. What Americans spend $10,000 on, I could do for $1,000. What takes them $1,000, we often manage with $100. I’m not saying dumping prices is right — but when survival is at stake, resource efficiency matters.
Against this backdrop, it was striking to hear that the Post once spent nine months and mobilized 75 journalists on a single project. Morally justified? Perhaps. Financially justified? Absolutely not.
I believe the core problem of The Washington Post is not that Jeff Bezos turned out to be less ethical than people hoped. He is an oligarch. He makes money. No matter how much we wish things were different, they never were going to be.
The real problem is that too many journalists still don’t know how — or don’t want — to earn money in this new reality. Most refuse even to think seriously about the informational challenges we now face.
Unfortunately, the crisis at The Washington Post is now visible to everyone. We urgently need to start building a new system of trust with broad audiences: stop lecturing them, and instead deliver the information they need — in formats they can actually absorb amid today’s information chaos.
We’ve become excellent at investigating and writing. We’ve forgotten how to win and keep audiences.
I sincerely sympathize with everyone who lost their job today. Being thrown into a rapidly shrinking market, without stability and with unclear prospects, is something no one envies.
I also regret that there will no longer be reporting from Ukraine in the Post about what happens here every day.
But this post is not just about grief or blame. It’s about stopping pretending the problems don’t exist and waiting for someone else to fix them. It’s about understanding that ethics, quality, and trust begin with us. Journalists must take responsibility for our own future into our own hands. It’s hard. It’s uncertain. There are no guarantees. But if we don’t start now, our profession simply will not survive.