Washington Post cancellations hit 250,000 – 10% of subscribers
Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.
The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.
A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.
The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-post-subscriber-cancellationsOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca727
Comments80
He's getting exactly what he wanted; to corrupt and neuter another stronghold of journalistic integrity, and turn it into his propaganda network.
He doesn't care whether it makes money or not. He's already richer than god, makes more profit than its entire worth every single week, and if Trump wins his personal tax cuts will be in the tens of billions.
even so, these are people who are realizing it isn't a valuable publication tuning out because this isn't when he got what we wanted. he got that a while ago
Just like Elon and Twitter
To him, I’m sure it’s an acceptable loss.
If Amazon Prime and AWS cancellations hit a significant level over this, that would have more of an impact.
Yup, he'll lose more revenue than those 10% WaPo subscribers under Harris. If Harris raises Amazon's taxes half a percent, this loss would become rounding error. Bezos wants Trump to win and wants to be Trump's friend for his own financial gain.
What drives someone with as much as Bezos to still want the high score to keep going up? This motherfucker should have to spend a month in a tent city.
You don't become a billionaire by thinking of others. It's such a mind-boggling amount of hoarded wealth that most of us can't even properly comprehend it...
He also knows most companies won’t cancel their AWS
So not only has he quite literally decimated their readerbase but he's also made every other newspaper run the story that they were going to endorse Harris anyway, instead of likely just limiting that information to the handful of Washington Post subscribers that cared enough to check. Great quash, Jeff, you really shut that one down.
Direct your money towards better journalism.
I suggest ProPublica.
This is key. Follow journalists and editors who leave WaPo and support them wherever they go.
Otherwise this may just be playing into the hand of Bezos to cripple yet another outlet that speaks truth to power.
ProPublica does phenomenal work.
I have commented how that decision led me to cancel my WaPo subscription which then snowballed into cancellations of Audible, Kindle Unlimited, Prime Video (ad-less), Amazon Photos, etc. Today I was chatting with my wife and she has now discarded the idea of using Blue Origin's satellite based internet access over Starlink. That's fifteen mobile response units where Jeff's space junk won't be considered.
Wait… your wife is ditching Kupier, which doesn’t exist yet, because of a single stunt Bezos pulled, but Starlink, run by the guy funding Trump’s election campaign, is still in the running?
Ditching the idea of transitioning to Kupier once available, yes. For now, most of the units are suspended (zero cost) until needed. My hope is that other options become available.
Oh man wait until you learn about Buc-ees
Bucees going into satellite internet? I'm lost.
Giant squirrel satellites with glowing red eyes staring down at Earth
The way they treat their employees. Zero breaks during an 8 hours shift, suing former employees, because of their owner, like the WaPo
Isn't Starlink Musk's outfit?
Yes, and we are desperate to ditch it. The idea was to switch to
Blue OriginAmazon's Project Kuiper as soon as it became available. Now it's fucked if we do and fucked if we don't.That said, fourteen of the Starlink units are suspended until needed, which means no monthly payments.
EDIT: I mistakenly called the satellite project Blue Origin.
Totally fair. And there are definitely reasons to dislike Bezos but on the which of the two is worse... Going Musk over Bezos feels a little.like the folks claiming trump will be better for Palestineans. Bezos didn't let his paper endorse trump, Musk is full on bribing people, campaign rallying for trump etc.
But to each their own, like I said, plenty of reasons to dislike Bezos.
Yes, it is. It is very hard to escape having relations with capitalist conglomerates in most sectors, in some it is impossible. That is why having political control of the State is the only way of the working class to control the billionaires, if the economy side of society is not radically altered.
We need to go back to guilds. Imagine a worker owned and managed rocket guild
Great information, thank you. My use of the Blue Origin name is my mistake. Regardless, the original goal was to ditch Starlink. Hopefully we will be able to do so.
Besos wipes his ass with those 250K subscribers. What he needs is to be stripped of his wealth.
Sure he needs to be taxed into dust. But he doesn't own the WaPo because it's making him rich. He runs it because it's a propaganda machine for him.
He lost 10% of his subscribers, almost immediately, when he tried to use it that way openly. Which says:
Given those two propositions, he might just unload it, which would be nice for the rest of us.
Yeah, its just I can't believe I'm living in cyberpunk shitty guilded age 2.0
Nationalize Amazon. It is a marketplace now
Hell yeah
It’s good to see the system working like it should for the free press for once; they made a terrible decision and they’re paying for it. Now, if we can just collectively turn our backs on all the disreputable sources and start promoting the reputable ones, we might fix a broken system.
A little like it should. Maybe it culminates in at least a temporary drop to the tune of 15-20%. Maybe $50 million dollars of lost revenue a year, assuming people stay pissed (and they frequently get over it, or some MAGA people decide to reward the outlets refusal to get behind Harris). Let's get super pessimistic and assume it totally tanks, and the first number I could find was about $600 million in annual revenue, so Bezos is out a bit over half a billion if this completely blows.
Just one of Trump's tantrums cost Bezos $10 Billion in revenue for Amazon. Burning the paper to the ground would be worth it to spare Bezos Trump's wrath moving forward.
I really wish his wife had gotten the WaPo in the divorce.
Finally some good fucking news.
Billionaires never do anything benevolent. I speculate Bezos is refused the endorsement in case Trump wins and holds a grudge.
Nah, Bezos wants Trump. Lower taxes, less regulation. He knows the backlash would be even worse if he forced an endorsement.
It really is all about the fuckin money.
This was a potential explanation as to why Bezos did that https://lemmy.haley.io/post/1058450
Do we really need an explanation as to why capitalists are okay with supporting fascists?
Yes, liberals would be democratic socialists if they understood.
Hopefully...
It was pretty much exactly the reasons I thought.
Note the other facet is not just the odds being close, but the consequences being different. If Trump wins, these people know he will be vindictive. In his first term he killed a $10 billion deal with Amazon due to WaPo's coverage and taking it out on Bezos at large. If Harris wins, then she's expected to be more proper, so kowtowing to Trump wouldn't have a downside. So bad behavior to a point is rewarded even in a good outcome, because the good behavior response doesn't call to be all pissy over this sort of thing.
Of course, would be mitigated if huge businesses chock full of ulterior motives didn't outright control big journalism outlets.
I forget the exact name of it, but there's a game theory problem adjacent to but not exactly the Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone votes yes or no, and if yes wins, everyone loses $20, but everyone who voted no loses $200. If no wins, nothing happens.
This is basically a variation of that problem.
should be paired with Amazon Prime cancelation for the double punch
I don’t imagine they thought that this would literally decimate their subscriber base.*
yes I made the same joke twice in two different communities. It’s not often you get to use the literal definition of decimate.Unless the former subscribers were executed, that's not the literal definition of decimate.
Historically (dating back to the 1600s) it could also be used for tithing or taxing one tenth of an amount too. Are you executing their money?
No, but WaPo is not literally paying a tithe or tax.
So not only do they loose the direct revenue from the subscribers, but because the readership has fallen significantly & publicly, advertisement revenue is going to fall, too, as the advertisers know the paper isn’t reaching as many readers.
bleed some more, bozo, and wapo will drop from 3rd to 4th (print circulation probably already has) largest, behind usa today
I can honestly count myself as one but also never using prime again either.
In a way this is better than an endorsement would've been. Especially because it's acknowledged who the would-be recipient of the endorsement would have been.
Sadly, that's chump change for him. 250k sub's at $120/yr comes out to $30M/yr. That's ~ 0.015% of his net wealth. Better than nothing though.
I believe that the main reason for people as wealthy as him to own newspapers is not the money, it's the influence. This does hurt that
That is an annual loss of $30 million. ha ha
let's gooooo!!
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5897e0_5cabc11d2cc34f059113cfb338411756~mv2_d_1772_1311_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_725,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/5897e0_5cabc11d2cc34f059113cfb338411756~mv2_d_1772_1311_s_2.jpg
::: spoiler The Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for The Guardian:
:::
::: spoiler Media Bias/Fact Check - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Media Bias/Fact Check:
::: ::: spoiler Search topics on Ground.News https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-post-subscriber-cancellations
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ ::: Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
I gotta be honest... I don't think news papers should officially endorse a candidate. Report on the issues accurately and call it a day. It reduces the perception of bias.
There is literally an entire section called "Opinion", where various columnists give their interpretation of the latest news.
And if they are giving opinions, they should give an opinion about who should be president.
Totally agree on the opinion section. I think if they want to they can opine on their candidate of choice, but I don't see it as a necessity.
Clearly I can't read....
They want to, but Bezos (who is not a journalist) is preventing them. That's the problem.
Editorial boards are strictly segregated from the objective reporters. Except for right wing media anyway.
True. I guess I can't read... Editorials are open season.
I have not been following this.
So, the headline says that the post is not endorsing a candidate.
And due to that, people are cancelling subscriptions.
Erm. Journalism should not be endorsing a candidate. Only reporting on events in an unbiased manner.
What am I missing?
The editorial board had written an unpublished endorsement for Harris, and they have been publicly endorsing presidents for the past ~50 years. This year they did not, and recently it was made public why: the billionaire owner, Jeff bezos, ordered them not to.
It is more about there being proof that the owner is having editorial control of the paper, than about any endorsement.
The owner controlling editorial decisions is to many, myself included who also cancelled my subscription, a violation of journalistic principles and not the product we are paying for.
I want to read a publication where skilled journalists can speak their mind, and that is no longer certain at the Washington Post, instead I must interpret their opinions as filtered through a billionaire's goals and opinions. I do not want to pay for that.
After decades of endorsing presidential candidates, this is the election they decided to stop doing so for.
You are missing literally all of the context. WaPo has endorsed in every presidential election since 1988. Suddenly, weeks before an incredibly contentious election, and right around the time Bezos-owned businesses met with Trump, this Bezos-owned publication decides to "return" to its "roots" (after three and a half decades). Even if it's not actually sinister (debatable, but we may never know), the appearance of impropriety is a serious issue and damages WaPo's credibility.
Newspapers report facts in one section and editorial opinions in a different section. They are clearly compartmentalized from each other. They are both useful. The editorial staff has a long history of making presidential endorsements. We're free to disagree with the endorsement, they are not telling us what to think, just giving us a perspective to consider among all the others we hear.
What the Post did is highly abnormal. It's not like the editorial staff decided out of nowhere to write up this endorsement. They did because it's an automatic thing they're expected to do before elections.
Think about watching a sports broadcast. There's typically two guys, one reporting play by play (facts) and the other adding color/analysis.
One candidate is a politician. One candidate is a fascist.
There’s a very clear dichotomy. And this is the first time in 50 years that they’re NOT making an endorsement. It’s very obviously an attempt by Bezos to avoid being targeted by Trump’s wrath if he wins.
Side note. What’s the point of having Fuck You money if you’re afraid to say “fuck you” to fascists?
I get what you’re saying, but Trump winning would imply a very explicit weaponization of the DoJ against Trump’s enemies, in a way that their money wouldn’t protect them.
There’s a pertinent, current example: Putin and Russia. Super rich oligarchs fall out of windows onto several bullets in the backs of their heads all the time in Moscow these days.
So, rather than using his considerable power and resources to prevent this tragic outcome, he’s electing to preemptively kiss ass and hope it’s enough to keep the eye of sauron aimed elsewhere? Fucking selfish coward. No matter how much Bezos could risk by standing up, ordinary people will always be at greater risk when they stand up. He can hire next level security, travel anywhere in the world and still be safer and more comfortable than any of us going to protests in any major city.
Turns out you don't become one of the world's richest men by not being a fucking selfish coward.
Oh, I agree. It’s a bitch-ass cowardly move.
It is extremely common for newspapers to support a candidate. Maybe even the norm. It certainly is for local politics.
That's great in theory, but this isn't the Election to not endorse a candidate. They've also been endorsing candidates for a while. So it's a clear signal of bezos tacit endorsement of trump.
Their editorial board has endorsed candidates for years. They were prepared to do so again, and then bezos met with trump and canceled the endorsement that was all ready to go. If they had stopped endorsements earlier, it wouldn't be notable.
Jesus christ ppl don't downvote someone for respectfully asking a question.
I don’t think it was the question, I think it was this:
Which sounds like it’s arguing against freedom of the press.
Nothing about it comes across as respectful. They openly admit they haven't been following the story and don't have context, and then put out an opinion on the story when all the facts and context they needed were in the story this post is linking to.
The fact that that opinion was essentially regurgitating Bezos' talking point just makes it worse.