The Washington Post has lost more than 200,000 subscribers since owner Jeff Bezos blocked the publication’s plans to endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential race.
That 200,000 number represents only those that had cancelled their subscriptions as of Monday afternoon. Still, for a paper with 2.5 million total subscribers, the number represents around 8% of the publication’s paid circulation. The number of cancelations is likely to continue growing through the week.
“It’s a colossal number,” Marcus Brauchli, former Washington Post eExecutive editor, told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”
News broke last week that the Post had a Harris endorsement all ready to go until news came down that owner and Amazon founder Bezos was nixing the plan outright.
Employees had thought the process was moving slow, but were assured the endorsement would happen. Then news came last Friday that Bezos wasn’t picking a side.
“We thought we were dickering over language — not over whether there would be an endorsement,” a Post employee told The Columbia Journalism Review’s Sewell Chan.
Brauchli, for his part, urged readers not to cancel their subscription – that doing so would be a disservice to everyone.
“It is a way to send a message to ownership, but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,” he told NPR. “There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post’s journalists is among the best in the world.”
The Post declined to comment.
The Post’s decision not to endorse came only days after the Los Angeles Times announced they wouldn’t be backing a candidate either. The Times’ owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, stated that the decision not to endorse came from the editorial board — but the L.A. Times Guild issued a statement objecting to Soon-Shiong “unfairly shift[ing] blame onto editorial board members.”
