Hannah Rosen

Shrinking our international footprint.

One of their reporters based in Ukraine posted to X, I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone.

We'll be closing the books section.

A suspension of their daily news show.

We'll be suspending the Post Reports podcast.

every single department would be impacted.

In less than 30 minutes, a historic journalistic institution cut its staff by almost a third after two previous rounds of punishing layoffs.

This was the home of the Watergate investigation.

Publisher of the Pentagon Papers.

winner of dozens and dozens of Pulitzer Prizes.

And just to break that down, a paper in the backyard of the White House and Congress that has many times uncovered people in power lying or grifting or failing to do their jobs in ways that affect every single American, whether or not they live in D.C.

Not to mention all the work their reporters have done in Ukraine and China and the Middle East and anywhere else in the world where crisis might be brewing.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

There are only a handful of mainstream national journalistic institutions left with that kind of robust infrastructure — experienced editors and reporters, photographers, foreign correspondents — who can expertly monitor people in power.

Particularly at this moment in American history, when those people seem to be grifting and lying in new and elaborate ways.

Whose fault is this?

Why does it matter?

We talked to Joshua Benton.

He's a longtime newspaper reporter and the founder of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, where he writes about the media business.