Member Newsletter
NPR reported yesterday afternoon that The Washington Post has lost more than 200,000 subscription in the backlash against owner Jeff Bezos’ last minute intervention ending the Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates. That’s a staggering figure, far more than I would have guessed. When I wrote my piece over the weekend, the clearest report was that they’d lost over 2,000 subscriptions. If I understand the numbers right, the Post lost almost 10% of its paying subscribers in a single weekend. Again, a totally stunning and in business terms devastating number — in part because the cancellations appear to continue.
I got some inkling that the damage might be severe when TPM Reader BS emailed me this morning to tell me that after canceling his subscription, he received a special offer to restart his subscription including a link to a new article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank argues that he’s not giving up on the Post and he hopes readers don’t either. If the Post had lost a couple thousand subscribers, that would have been a downer for them and certainly a black eye among news super-consumers and what we might call elite news and politics opinion. (I use “elite” here in a purely descriptive sense.) But it wouldn’t be a huge thing in business terms. And I’d be surprised if the institution itself would address the issue so frontally in the pitches to cancelling members. That’s especially since basically all of the columnists and reporters asking readers not to leave do so while roundly denouncing Bezos’ decision.