The Winter Olympics is a quadrennial media spectacle, drawing parka-clad sportswriters, photojournalists and TV anchors from around the world.
This year, a team from The Washington Post won’t be among them.
Kimi Yoshino, a managing editor of The Washington Post, sent a terse and unexpected email to more than a dozen of the newspaper’s journalists on Friday, notifying them that their coverage plans were abruptly being changed.
“As we assess our priorities for 2026, we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics,” Ms. Yoshino wrote. “We realize this decision and its timing will be disappointing to many of you, so please reach out to me if you want to talk further.”
Ms. Yoshino’s email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, took journalists at The Post by surprise, since it came just two weeks before the Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Italy in early February. Many had already paid for their travel arrangements, according to two people familiar with their plans.
A spokeswoman for The Washington Post had no comment on Saturday morning.
The Post’s decision not to send its journalists to cover a major sporting event with widespread global appeal breaks with years of precedent at the newspaper. Since the newspaper was purchased more than a decade ago by Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, The Post has aggressively expanded its international presence, opening editing hubs in Seoul and London and hiring reporters to cover breaking news around the world.
But The Post has been retrenching in recent years as losses at the paper have piled up. In 2023, The Post offered buyouts to eliminate 240 jobs amid losses of $100 million and overly rosy projections for subscriptions and advertising revenue. Last year, The Post offered another round of buyouts that were accepted by many of the paper’s marquee journalists.
The Post generally sent about 10 to 20 newsroom employees to cover the Olympics, though it typically devoted more resources to the summer games than to the winter competitions. In 2024, for example, the newspaper sent 26 journalists to cover the summer games in Paris — a peak deployment for The Post, according to one Post employee. It had secured 14 credentials for the Milano Cortina games, the person said.
According to the Post employee, the newspaper has already paid the vast majority of its expenses to cover the competition. Those include flights for the journalists, housing and office space at the Olympics site. Housing alone tallies at least $80,000, the employee said. Post management approved the outlays at each step along the way, according to the employee.
Articles about the Olympics have consistently ranked among the most popular sports coverage at The Post, the employee said.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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