This summer, one day before Fred Ryan officially stepped down as publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, the newspaper threw him a farewell party. The lavish send-off was held on the fourth floor of the paper’s DC headquarters and attended by ambassadors, top Washington lawyers, and advisers to multiple presidents. At the party, the company’s chief financial officer, Steve Gibson, stood onstage with an oversize box. It contained a rare bottle of wine that he was gifting Ryan—the author of Wine and the White House, which “explores every president’s experience of wine”—to honor his nine years leading the Post. Gibson effusively credited Ryan for the paper’s success.

A little over two months later, in mid-October, the newspaper said it had “overshot on expense,” was operating on faulty financial projections, and would offer buyouts to 240 employees across its staff. The Post is set to lose $100 million this year, The New York Times previously reported.

How did this happen? Post staff would like to know too. The voluntary buyouts are the third major cost-cutting measure in about a year: Last November, the Post killed off its award-winning Sunday magazine, and in January, the company laid off 20 newsroom employees and eliminated or froze 30 other positions. Targeting specific teams and departments suggests there’s a strategy behind all this, but staffers, in conversation with Vanity Fair, are unclear what that may be. As for the latest cuts, I’m told that executive editor Sally Buzbee picked which sections were eligible for buyouts, with many section editors learning of the decision at the same time as their staff—via email.

The paper appears at a crossroads, as senior leaders have made it clear to staff that they’re banking on 2024, when there’ll be no shortage of stories in the Post’s political wheelhouse (a consequential presidential election, Donald Trump’s criminal trials), to help rescue readership. There’s also a new CEO on the horizon. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive and longtime confidant of Post owner Jeff Bezos, is leading the search for Ryan’s replacement, and has reportedly narrowed it down to two candidates: Josh Steiner, an investor and longtime Bloomberg LP senior adviser, and Will Lewis, former CEO of Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones. (On Wednesday, however, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported that Steiner has taken himself out of the running.) “The process for selecting a CEO is still underway and we are likely to announce in November,” Post spokesperson Kathy Baird tells VF.

But questions remain about the Post’s long-term strategy, both as a business and editorially, concerns that the paper’s journalists have vocalized themselves at recent town halls with Stonesifer and Buzbee. Some reporters have pressed for answers, asking at what point the Post realized their business was in trouble, why Bezos—who made a rare visit to the newsroom in January amid tension between Buzbee and Ryan, and as the paper was hemorrhaging talent—did not get involved sooner, and whether the people responsible for the state of the business would be held accountable. (Other than Ryan, whom, I’m told, senior leaders have not hesitated to throw under the bus in private conversations.)

Two staffers I spoke to credited Post leaders for holding the town halls and trying to be transparent about the bad news, while also noting that, with a room full of journalists, a bunch of corporate speak and sugar coating wasn’t going to cut it. “There’s a lot of non-journalistic dishonesty here,” one tells me. “You’re talking about headwinds, you’re talking about core strategy, and the worst part is, every hard decision you had to make, you present as an opportunity.” As another puts it: “People are willing to be patient and muddle through, to try to do good work and expect things to get better. But at some point there has to be a feeling that we have a plan for the future.”

When Stonesifer, who has served on Amazon’s board for more than two decades, started as interim CEO, she told the newsroom there would be no layoffs, comments that she later admitted in a town hall “were naive.” These buyouts, she wrote in an email to staff, were designed “in the hopes of averting more difficult actions such as layoffs—a situation we are united in trying to avoid.” In negotiations with the Washington Post Guild, the company has refused to say there will not be layoffs following the buyouts.

“The buyout program that the Post has created is neither as generous as the Post has made it out to be nor truly voluntary,” Post Guild leadership says in a statement. “The Post has refused to expand eligibility to all employees rather than targeting certain departments; provide continued access to health insurance; or bolster pensions for long-tenured employees.

Guild leadership adds: “Our hard-working colleagues are going to lose their jobs because of the short-sighted business decisions made by management over the past few years.… The buyout program is funded almost entirely by Post employees’ retirement funds, and we will continue to demand a program that works for us.”

Meanwhile, there’s been lingering frustration with Buzbee’s low-key leadership style and questions about her vision for the Post, concerns that have only intensified amid the news of the buyouts, a reversal of the unprecedented newsroom expansion that Buzbee has helped oversee. Growth, more than anything, seemed to be her mandate. Which makes it even more unclear what the mission will be once these cuts shake out. Some people have complained directly to Stonesifer that Buzbee is part of the problem, according to two staffers.

“We have an editor who doesn’t know what she’s doing, a publisher who didn’t know what he was doing, and an owner who took his eye off the ball,” one of the staffers tells me.

It took some effort to get Bezos to pay attention. His visit in January came as the relationship between Buzbee and Ryan had grown increasingly untenable, and just before he visited, I’m told, Buzbee personally reached out to Bezos to discuss the situation. (The Post declined to comment on Buzbee’s outreach to Bezos.) Around this time, Bezos was also alerted to the breakdown between the editor and publisher by Bob Woodward, the legendary Post journalist who helped break the Watergate scandal. Woodward and Bezos have known each other for decades; in 2013, when Bezos visited the Post shortly after becoming its new owner, the two had a private breakfast together, and Woodward has publicly acknowledged that he’s communicated with him about the Post’s recent troubles.

When Bezos bought the paper in 2013, he said he sought to “figure out a new golden era at the Post,” in which it needed “not just to survive, but to grow.” The aspiration seemed to be to become the world’s leading news site, a mission echoed in the 2021 appointment of Buzbee, who’d spent her whole career at the Associated Press. “I came to the Post at the right time where it’s trying to become more of a global news organization,” Buzbee told me one year into her tenure. Ryan, then still publisher, told me the newsroom “added more roles”—over 150—”since she arrived in a single year than any year in our history.” Buzbee was trying to make the rest of the paper as strong as her predecessor Marty Baron had made national politics and investigations, creating two new departments, climate and wellness, and prioritizing technology and international news.

During the latest town hall, National editor Matea Gold, said a goal for 2024 was owning coverage about “politics, our divided nation, and threats to democracy”—but then rattled off a bunch of other corners of the newsroom, including sports, health and science, as well as culture, arts, media, and entertainment. As one Post reporter put it to me, “We thought they were probably just going to come out and say that all they cared about was politics. Instead, they said we care about all of you, but then couldn’t articulate a vision for what that meant.”

The Post’s national political coverage remains strong, but Joe Biden’s White House has made for comparatively dull reading following the leaky Trump team, rife with backstabbing and infighting that played out in the press. “We knew we’d lose some folks with Trump, but…we thought we’d be able to hold onto them, that the quality of the work we were doing in other areas would hold them. It didn’t hold,” Stonesifer told staff when she announced the staff reductions last month. (Not to mention, the Post—already competing against the likes of the Times, Politico, and Axios during the Trump years—is now also facing stiff competition on the congressional front from Punchbowl, whose cofounder, Jake Sherman, was just profiled this week in the Post’s own Style section.)

“The Post still gets plenty of wins, but not as many as before, and the leadership doesn’t seem to know what they want to do,” says one staffer. “More than anything, 2024 has to be the year where someone at the Post at a senior level delineates: What do we want to be?” says another staffer. “Are we going to have a business plan that hinges on politics and scales back other things? Are we going to acquire new things? There’s gotta be some answers on things that are above reporters’ pay grades.”

The Post hasn’t been shy about the need to increase traffic and subscriptions, as Stonesifer and Buzbee have both acknowledged in the town halls. Digital subscribers, currently 2.5 million, dropped more than 15% since 2021, according to the Post, and overall digital audience declined by 28% over the same period. Recently, the Audience team has been closely studying audience and traffic on a desk-by-desk basis, I’m told, putting together presentations for various teams—called “desk dives”—in which they discuss trendlines for the section and what readers are looking for.

Bezos himself gave staff a statement of editorial priorities last month, when he put out a rare note to the newsroom following “an invigorating 48 hours” at the paper. He shouted out the “great and important work from members of our Ukraine reporting team, the Climate team, Politics team, Opinions, and Well+Being” that he learned about during his visit. Notably, areas expected to be most affected by the buyouts—such as Metro, which the Post is aiming to trim by nearly a quarter, as well as audio and video teams—were not mentioned.