WaPo’s Axed Protest Reporter Leads Fired Journalists in Protest Outside Paper’s Headquarters

Fired Washington Post journalists protested outside the paper’s headquarters this week after management cut roughly 30 percent of its newsroom. They were led by Marissa J. Lang, whom the Post hired in 2018 to head the paper’s protest coverage.

"Who makes the Post?" Lang asked outside the paper’s offices. "We do!" the other fired reporters shouted back.

Lang, who was fired from the paper on Feb. 4, began in 2018 as the Post's "lead protest reporter." She wrote articles about the "hope" that fueled the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, calling the demonstrations "transformative" for a generation of activists. She then transitioned to covering "high-impact stories in the D.C. region," like "housing, gentrification, zeroing in on the affordable housing crisis, homelessness, and the transformation of cities."

"I am exceptionally proud of the stories that I did," Lang told WUSA9. "They were accountability stories about what happens to homeless people when they're evicted from their encampments." She was part of the team of reporters that received a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.

Lang, long tasked with covering protests, found herself on Thursday at the center of one.

Hundreds of journalists and activists gathered to block the front entrance of the Post's headquarters on Thursday, protesting the beleaguered paper's mass layoffs. Over 300 employees were let go. Editors gutted the sports, foreign, and local coverage desks after years of collapsing readership and financial losses.

The paper is in the midst of a bad hangover after going all in on an anti-Trump editorial strategy during President Donald Trump's first term, using the marketing slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Paid subscriptions surged, and the publisher almost doubled the size of its newsroom to a peak of about 1,000 people in early 2021. But when President Joe Biden took power, interest in the "resistance" flagged, subscription revenue plummeted, and the Post has been losing money and cutting staff. Reader interest has also plummeted from a high of 110 million unique monthly users in January 2021 to 62 million in January 2026.

"This is a difficult time," Executive Editor Matt Murray told the Post's staff on Wednesday. "We all want to save it. We all want to create a Washington Post that can grow and thrive again."

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