The beginning of February brought bad news for those of us who follow the climate story. The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos summarily laid off anywhere from 300 to 375 WaPo reporters — including most of the journalists on the climate desk.
The Post’s stories have often led the field of high-quality and wide-ranging climate coverage. Again and again, those stories have risen to the top in my own collections of useful readings on various climate-change topics.
Here are some highlights of the Post’s climate journalism over recent years, up to and including last week’s bloodbath.
In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, who had owned it since 1933. In 2016, Bezos remarked in an interview that “democracy dies in darkness,” and in 2017, this became the Post’s masthead slogan.
In 2019, for Earth Day, the Washington Post Magazine featured “24 magazine covers, about climate change,” each one strikingly “illustrating an aspect of climate change that the Post wrote about in the past year or so.”
From August to December, the Post published 10 feature articles in a high-powered series called “2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT.” More than 50 people contributed to these pieces, which are both textually and visually rich, including Chris Mooney, John Muyskens, Madison Walls, Carolyn Van Houten, Aaron Steckelberg, Harry Stevens, Monica Ulmanu, Simon Denyer, Salwan Georges, Darryl Fears, Bonnie Jo Mount, Anton Troianovski, Michael Robinson Chavez, Brady Dennis, and Juliet Eilperin. Here is the first story, which concentrated on the U.S., especially the New Jersey Shore; here is the last, “How we know global warming is real.”
In November, the “Climate Solutions” series launched, intending to “explore the people and organizations focused on tackling global warming.” With seven new pieces published in January 2026, the series has continued. We’ll see what happens now.
In 2020, the “2C: Beyond the Limit” series won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Here is our story about that accomplishment and the series.
In 2022: “The Washington Post invests in climate coverage as its team expands to over 30 journalists” (Sara Guaglione, Digiday.com). Many journalists with other beats became involved as well, as the paper took note of how far the tentacles of climate change reach into other realms of the news.
Several new climate-related initiatives followed at the Washington Post, including:
- Climate Lab: “Data-driven, visual reporting on key issues in climate and environment news, explained in graphics, maps, photos, interactives and more.” Future unknown.
- Climate Coach: A newsletter with advice for daily life written by Michael J. Coren. Still publishing as of early February 2026.
- Hidden Planet: features “light-hearted” stories about the planet. Written by Kasha Patel, who was just laid off.
- More features about animals, originally called “Animalia,” with writers Karin Brulliard and Dino Grandoni. Here is a collection of stories by Grandoni, who was just laid off.
More stories about the expansion of climate coverage in 2022:
What all these pieces made very clear was the excitement of the newspaper’s staff at this expansion of climate change journalism and their commitment to doing their newly energized jobs well.
In 2024, the paper created an experimental AI tool that allowed users to search for answers to climate questions drawing on The Post’s reporting.
In 2025, Bezos announced that the paper’s editorials would focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets.” This move was widely seen as a concession to the Trump administration’s pressure on the press and on free speech.
In 2026: On February 3, the Guardian’s Jeremy Barr wrote about unease at the Post amid rumors of coming layoffs: “Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos stays silent as employees brace for cuts.”
On February 4, in a blockbuster piece in his Substack column, Climate Colored Goggles, reporter Sammy Roth, until recently of the Los Angeles Times, scooped the field on the day of the layoffs with “Breaking: Washington Post gutting its climate team.” Roth put these firings into a broad context of the Washington Post’s history of climate journalism, Bezos’ changing relationship with the Trump administration, and the state of climate journalism in general, including the October gutting by CBS of its strong climate team. His subtitle, “Clean energy dies in darkness,” was perhaps the first of a new blizzard of parodies of the paper’s motto.
Equally admirable was the piece from February 8 by former Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning climate-journalist Chris Mooney in his Substack, “ReportEarth: The Washington Post and the tragic decline of newspapers.” (Subtitle “And, just maybe, of climate journalism.”) Mooney told his own story of working at The Post (and winning that Pulitzer), reported what he learned from former colleagues, and reminded readers of the paper’s climate coverage history. Then, in detail, he described the larger picture of both climate journalism and print journalism in general, drawing in part on the work of the Media and Climate Change Observatory.
That same day, MS Now’s Ari Velshi interviewed former Post editor Martin Baron (YouTube, 10 minutes), which offered a comprehensive inside summary of Bezos’ tenure as owner, from “democracy dies in darkness” to the change in editorial policy, likely worry about reprisals from Trump, and the mass layoffs.
Finally, The Post’s comprehensive climate page is impressive evidence of the newspaper’s recent focus on this topic. We can but hope the few remaining climate-focused reporters continue at least some of this good work.
