Ask any reporter what the hardest beat in Washington is and you’ll rarely hear “the White House.” The White House announces things. The hard beat is everything after the announcement: the agency that has to carry out the order with a third fewer staff, the court that blocks it, the GAO report that lands eight months later and gets one paragraph in one trade publication. CrossGov.com lives on that beat. It’s a site about US government, federal first, state and local second, and it reads like a reporter’s notebook kept by someone who actually opens the inspector general reports.

Run the 2026 list in one go and the scale becomes hard to argue with. BuzzFeed cut a third of its staff after Byron Allen’s takeover. GB News proposed cutting roughly a third of its own after building what it described as groundbreaking automated workflows. The Washington Post cut hundreds in February, about a third of the business. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution went for around fifty jobs, fifteen percent of staff. CBS News cut about sixty-six people, six percent, and closed CBS News Radio in the process.

Eight winners and finalists in this year’s Pulitzers used artificial intelligence somewhere in their reporting. That fact sits awkwardly next to a year of layoffs blamed on automation, and both things are true at once, which is the part worth working through. The AI that wins prizes and the AI that eliminates jobs are being deployed by different people for different reasons, and conflating them makes the industry’s conversation about this worse.