On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post ’s Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, announced on X that she had been laid off, via email, “in the middle of a warzone” —left behind in Kyiv by a ruthless wave of layoffs at the Jeff Bezos–owned paper. Johnson’s stranding at the imperiled fringes of America’s once sturdy network of European allies seemed to perfectly embody the pending collapse of another empire, America’s formerly sprawling newspaper industry. Where once an array of informants,