Cuts are being anticipated across foreign, sports and metro. Not a great way to maintain a large footprint, nor a way to keep local subscribers. This looks an awful lot like circling the drain.

The Washington Post has consistently produced high-quality, news cycle-leading reporting over the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic and unpredictable second administration. But that work has been produced under a cloud of uncertainty and rumors of widespread job cuts.

Those long-rumored cuts now appear to be close, with staffers expecting the ax to drop in early February – though nothing is certain. Inside the Post, staffers have tossed around estimates of potential cuts, with most exceeding 100, which would represent more than 10% of the newsroom – but no one really knows how widespread the cuts will be – or in fact if they will happen at all. The sections most likely to be affected by the cuts include sports, metro and foreign, according to staffers who spoke with the Guardian.

On Sunday morning, members of the foreign staff, concerned that the section could be decimated by cuts, sent a letter to billionaire owner Jeff Bezos urging him to change course and conveying the significance of international reporting for the institution — and for the public interest. Approximately 60 people signed the letter.

“We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance – not the shared success that remains attainable,” the staffers wrote in the letter, reviewed by the Guardian but first reported by the New York Times. The signatories, which included many of the paper’s most prominent international journalists, said they are open to “finding ways to reduce our costs even further” in discussion with management – “while retaining as many jobs as we can”.