Washington DC - The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced major job cuts Wednesday, saying that "painful" restructuring was needed at the storied newspaper.

The Post, which gained legendary status when it helped bring down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, will see "substantial" reductions in a newsroom, which until now had an estimated 800 journalists, Executive Editor Matt Murray said.

The shrinking of the Post comes as major traditional media outlets in the US face intense pressure from President Donald Trump, who routinely denigrates journalists as "fake news" and has launched multiple lawsuits over coverage of his presidency.

Bezos, one of the world's richest people, has become close to Trump in his second term. His Amazon behemoth controversially paid Trump's wife, First Lady Melania Trump, a reported $40 million for a documentary on her this year, along with another $35 million for marketing.

Murray said the shifts at the Post reflect the radically changing economy for the news media.

This "will help to secure our future... and provide us stability moving forward," Murray said in a note to employees.

He cited changes to the news ecosystem, from individuals who "generate impact at low cost" to AI-generated content, as well as financial challenges that have already produced rounds of cost-cutting and buyouts at the Post.

"The company's structure is too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product," he said. "And even as we produce much excellent work, we too often wrote from one perspective, for one slice of the audience."

Claire Parker, the Cairo bureau chief for the Post, said on X that she had been laid off "along with the entire roster of Middle East correspondents and our editors.

"Hard to understand the logic," she added.

A member of the Washington Post's graphics teams told AFP it had been reduced from 25 people to nine. Sports and local news departments are being sharply scaled back, and the paper's daily podcast, Post Reports, is being dropped, local media reported.

"These layoffs are not inevitable. A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach, and its future," the labor union representing many Post Journalists said in a statement slamming the job cuts.

It called for supporters of the paper, acquired by Bezos in 2013, to rally outside its Washington headquarters at noon.

"If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then The Post deserves a steward that will," The Washington Post Guild statement said.

Marty Baron, the Post's executive editor until 2021, said: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."