At first, the rumors of firings at The Washington Post were understood only generally, though it was clear that the quantitative modifier for “layoffs” would be “mass.” Then, in recent weeks, reporting on the Post began to carry grim specificity: The paper was planning to entirely shutter its sports desk and radically cut back its international coverage. Finally, on Wednesday morning, executive editor Matt Murray revealed the true extent of the damage: Hundreds of staffers would be laid off, nearly a third of its roughly 800-person newsroom. The Post reportedly shut down its sports desk and books section, gutted its international team, and drastically reduced local coverage. The firings make for a radical transformation of an iconic paper that for decades has maintained an international footprint with bureaus in Sydney, Bogotá, and Cairo, and which just a few years ago harbored not-unrealistic ambitions to compete with The New York Times on the national stage. The cuts were, in the words of Murray, “substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments” in an effort to create …