Even the Obit Writers Are Jumping Ship at The Washington Post

Politico

24-07-2025

The obituary exits are part of a broader exodus of top talent from the Post, ranging from columnist Jonathan Capehart to pioneering sports blogger Dan Steinberg and Tik Tok trailblazer Dave Jorgenson . The departures are particularly pronounced in the opinion section, where Bezos earlier this year declared that the publication would henceforth only publish items in support of free markets and civil liberties.
In the media business, the buyout has led to something of a feeding frenzy , with numerous staffers taking the money and then swinging to outlets like The Athletic and The Atlantic. One veteran Post editor told me about getting a call at 9:30 in the evening from a New York Times recruiter asking about a couple of potential hires from the Post. The editor remarked that the recruiter was working rather late, and the recruiter said that the Times higher-ups had them working double shifts in the name of settling on who to poach before the end-of-July deadline.
Beyond the familiar media-in-crisis storyline, there's something particularly poignant about the hollowing out of the obituary staff. Reporters or (ahem!) columnists might be let go; the work of digging up scoops or making arguments continues. It's not clear whether the same can be said for the work of writing unflinchingly about deceased notables. In dropping obits — or just limiting them to only the best-known people — an organization abandons something that used to be a basic element of being the paper of record.
'Obits are one of the three or four most essential elements in creating what Bezos calls the daily habit ' of news consumption, said Marc Fisher, a longtime Metro columnist who took a previous Post buyout (and today continues to write on a contract for the opinion section).
As a business proposition, it's a conundrum. The Post pulled back on smaller-time obituaries in part because they got so little attention online. A few decades ago, the standard for inclusion was simply having lived in Washington for 20 years.
Yet many paying subscribers — the readers a media company covets more than random online visitors — are fiercely devoted to obits, reading them first. Like coverage of high school football or hometown socialites, they're also a way for a publication to make itself central to its community.
In the Washington of the second Trump era, that community is already feeling unprecedented disruption that has nothing to do with media staffing decisions. The tumult wrought by the mass federal firings and agency closures has upended the elites who used to count on getting written up once they die. In the current context, not earning a Washington Post obituary may be the least of their problems. Yet it adds to the general sense of withering institutions and evaporating hierarchies.
'They are not only a place to memorialize people who had what I call good Washington lives, but also a place where people who are interested in good Washington lives go to learn, to see how they got their start or how they got into government,' said Tevi Troy, a longtime conservative policy hand who frequently posts links to Post obituaries on social media. 'You work in one of these jobs, like undersecretary or something, and you're a big deal in one administration, maybe. But you're not, like, Schwarzenegger famous. And then you're out. But when you die, you get written up because it mattered how you got there and what you did. I often read one and think, 'I wish I could have read this before he died.''