In late December, word of who’d taken a buyout at The Washington Post began to trickle out. Reporters found themselves especially alarmed by the hard cost cutting hit taken by one particular department: news research, a unit that assists investigations by, among other things, tracking down subjects, finding court records, verifying claims, and scouring documents. The department’s three most senior researchers—Magda Jean-Louis and Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Crites and Jennifer Jenkins—had all accepted buyouts, among the 240 that the company offered employees across departments amid financial struggles. That left news research with only two people: supervisor Monika Mathur and researcher Razzan Nakhlawi.

A group of Post journalists were so concerned about the gutting of the department that they expressed that sentiment in writing last week to executive editor Sally Buzbee and Will Lewis, the paper’s new publisher and CEO. The buyouts have “left us at a real disadvantage both in experience and sheer numbers when compared with our competitors,” the letter read, according to a copy reviewed by Vanity Fair. “We are eager to start off 2024 with a renewed sense of purpose and feel it will put us at a considerable disadvantage if our news research department is in such a diminished state.” The letter—whose signatories included Post stars such as Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Jacqueline Alemany, Beth Reinhard, and Sarah Ellison—urged management to both bring Crites and Jean-Louis back in some capacity and provide more “permanent support” for those remaining in the department.

The objective, according to one Post staffer, was to convey to Lewis and Buzbee that while news research may be a small department, “it actually may be the most important one we have at the paper in some ways.” Researchers “have access to all these databases and tools that we don’t have. So either you have to give us the tools to do it or hire more people.” Buzbee, I’m told, responded to the letter, saying that they were working on it and trying to bring someone on. “The solution so far is not really acceptable,” the staffer said, noting that reallocating someone from another team “doesn’t replace two multiple-time Pulitzer-[winning] researchers who can find anything in the world.”

Stress over the research buyouts speaks to broader anxiety inside the Post, which heads into this election year with less manpower and lingering uncertainty around both business and editorial strategy. “In general, going into this year with 10% of the company just shaved off—it’s sort of like you wake up January 2 and think, Okay, shit, here we go,” as a second staffer put it. Names impacted in the buyout action flooded out in the final weeks of 2023, a staggering list that included longtime editors and writers with a wealth of experience and institutional knowledge, such as Opinion columnist Greg Sargent, national correspondent Scott Wilson, media reporter Paul Farhi, senior editor Marc Fisher, and investigative editor Jeff Leen. The Post has also begun the year with news that its chief revenue officer, Alex MacCallum, is departing after less than six months on the job. She’s reportedly in talks to return to CNN, where she formerly served as a top digital executive—and where Mark Thompson, her former Times boss, is now running the show. Lewis, meanwhile, apparently wants to be a presence in the newsroom in ways that predecessor Fred Ryan seemed to deliberately avoid. I’m told that he has sent several reporters personal notes about their stories, and was seen walking around the newsroom last week.

A variety of newsroom concerns—from the immediate impact of the buyouts, to MacCallum’s exit, to the health of the business—were raised last week during a National desk meeting held by Buzbee and managing editor Matea Gold, which more than 100 employees attended. (Buzbee, I’m told, is kicking off the New Year by holding such meetings with various teams, such as local and international.) The state of the research team was on the minds of several staffers, who pointed out that Crites had been the go-to for reporters on everything from school shootings to legal briefings to finding the cell phone numbers of people who very much did not want to be found—so much so that she was often given a co-byline on pieces. Alemany called the research team the linchpin of any ambitious endeavor at the Post and described how Crites had handed her the keys to some of her biggest scoops. Reinhard mentioned that the Post never replaced Pulitzer-winning researcher Julie Tate when she decamped for The New York Times in 2021, and noted that the paper was now without Crites, who’d been holding up the department for a while. “To be honest, it wasn’t really on my radar,” a third staffer conceded to me—not until hearing “these reporters saying all their best stories were done with researchers.”

Also during the session, Parker said she’d been stunned to learn in a prior meeting that the Post had lost about 60 people of color in the past two years, a stat she’d heard from deputy managing editor Monica Norton, who has been keeping her own unofficial list. (The number of journalists of color who have been hired in the last two years exceeds the number of journalists of color who have left in that same period, according to a source familiar with the matter.) Other reporters in the meeting also expressed concerns that the buyouts would make the paper less diverse, according to two staffers. Buzbee said that the Post had conducted copious amounts of testing to understand how the buyouts would impact its diversity, according to the source with knowledge of the situation. She also said the Post did not yet have numbers to share on how the buyouts had impacted diversity at the paper.

“The Post has a long history of holding power to account and we adhere to that legacy every day, including in times of transition,” Buzbee said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “Right now, we’re committed to fulfilling that mission and to building a newsroom of the future.”

Scaling back staff while heading into a pivotal presidential election year seems like an especially ill-timed move given the Post’s traditional strengths in national politics and policy. Senior editors at the Post have been banking on heightened interest in the election to juice readership amid slowed traffic and subscriptions. At one point in the meeting, according to two staffers, investigative reporter Carol Leonnig said that over the years she’d been told that the National team was doing great work and that issues on the business side would be taken care of, only for the problems to persist.

In November, I reported how staffers were seeking clarity about the Post’s future, with the central question being, as one staffer put it, “What do we want to be?” The question remains, and was at the heart of the National meeting. Congressional reporter Paul Kane got the room’s attention when he questioned the paper’s editorial strategy by reading the top headlines on the Post homepage off his phone: a hodgepodge about everything from national security to how to stop worrying about FOMO. No offense, he said, per two staffers, but there was great journalism being buried on the homepage. Veteran political reporter Dan Balz also chimed in to ask about the paper’s sensibility and character—what message was the Post trying to send about what it stands for?

Buzbee talked about the need to feature lighter stories amid news fatigue, and how the Post needed to get smarter on SEO—at which some reporters rolled their eyes, considering they’d been discussing SEO internally for years. Buzbee noted Lewis’s dedication to hard news, expressing her excitement about his years spent working on the issue of journalism in the social media era. Some attendees I spoke to didn’t find Buzbee’s responses particularly satisfying, however; a fourth staffer felt that the top editor didn’t “answer the fundamental question of who we are.”

This story has been updated.