Yesterday the Washington Post held a town hall event where publisher Fred Ryan announced that layoffs were coming. A post staffer took video of the announcement and another staffer posted it on Twitter.

NEW: @washingtonpost publisher Fred Ryan refuses to take staff questions after announcing Q1 layoffs in “Town Hall” @postguild pic.twitter.com/C4HOXb6y2C

— Annie Gowen (@anniegowen) December 14, 2022

Later in the day, the paper’s union posted a slightly longer clip with a transcription of what was being said. Watch to the end and you’ll see there’s not a lot of difference between the behavior of the Post Guild and your average student protest group. “You can’t walk away!” someone shouted. But in fact, he could and he did.

Today, we came into WaPo’s so-called town hall with questions about recent layoffs and the future of the company.

Our publisher dropped a bombshell on us by announcing more layoffs and then walking out, refusing to answer any of our questions. pic.twitter.com/ajNZsZKOBr

— Washington Post Guild (@PostGuild) December 14, 2022

The reference to “the magazine staffers” is about 10 employees who were let go just a couple weeks ago. Here’s the Post covering its own drama:

The Washington Post will continue to eliminate jobs early next year, Publisher Fred Ryan said Wednesday, weeks after the paper announced it will shutter its Sunday magazine and lay off 11 newsroom employees.

Ryan said at a companywide meeting that the cuts will probably amount to a “single-digit percentage” of the company’s 2,500 employees but did not provide specifics…

The development comes during a difficult season for media workers, as companies across the industry have laid off workers and instituted hiring freezes. Citing “economic head winds” as a factor last month, The Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, announced the newspaper will end its weekly stand-alone magazine, along with the jobs of its 10 staffers. The magazine’s last issue will publish Dec. 25. The company also eliminated the job of Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman. None of those employees were offered new roles at the paper.

As for the Guild’s claim that this was a “bombshell” that can’t be true, at least not if the people in that room are paying attention to the news. The NY Times reported back in August that the Post was on track to lose money this year.

The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.

The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances. The Post now has fewer than the three million paying digital subscribers it had hailed internally near the end of 2020, according to several people at the organization…

Fred Ryan, the chief executive and publisher, in recent weeks has floated with newsroom leaders the possibility of cutting 100 positions, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions. The cuts, if they happen, could come through hiring freezes for open jobs or other ways. The newsroom now has about 1,000 people…

Many news outlets, in addition to The Post, have experienced declining readership since former President Donald J. Trump left office.

As I said at the time, the Post’s problem is that it became narrowly focused on a kind of resistance journalism with a strong dose of gloomy self-importance. After years of pumping out anti-Trump and anti-Republican screeds, the Post’s readership seems to have narrowed itself to the sort of very online progressives you find on Twitter. It’s the paper of Jen Rubin and Taylor Lorenz now. They both have their fans but at the cost of turning off a lot of other potential readers.

By contrast, the NY Times is also a very left-leaning paper but manages to publish stories that go beyond the narrow concerns of the anti-Trump left on a daily basis. It’s a better paper as a result and has managed to attract a readership that includes as many rational adults as left wing edge lords.

CNN, which also announced layoffs a few weeks ago, has attempted to escape the left-wing rut it fell into during the Trump years. They fired their own Jen Rubin in the form of Brian Stelter and moved Don Lemon out of prime time. (They also got rid of Chris Cuomo which helped.) That shift has been worrisome to many on the left who relied on the network for a reliable anti-GOP slant, but CNN’s new brass seems to have realized that the Trump era of easy hate-clicks is over.

As a subscriber to the Post who looks at the paper at least six days a week, it doesn’t feel to me like the Post has learned that lesson yet. But as the old saying goes, nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging. Maybe now that the cost of their partisan fixation is becoming clearer, the Post’s newsroom will move beyond its doom and gloom focus on democracy dying in darkness.