The Washington Post had over 200,000 subscribers leave after the Bezos block
The Washington Post Inside Out: Jeff Bezos’ First Year at the White House: How Did he Deflected Donald Trump during the Trump Presidency?
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We have an INSKEEP. I noticed there was a revelation about Elon Musk in the pages of The Washington Post on the same day as the announcement about the endorsement.
BARON: I wouldn’t. And I’m opposed to that. The Post is doing great work in its news department. The columnists there are also great. But in the news department, they continue to do investigative work. Investigative work contributes to our democracy. I hope the public continues to support that.
The Post has exposed many instances of illegal activity by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. Several Post journalists say their relatives are canceling their subscriptions.
In Trump’s previous term, Bezos didn’t flinch even when it came to Trump. There is no reason to think he is doing this.
Aron: “You’re right.” There was no question about that. Amazon is dependent on the federal government and does a lot of business with them for cloud computing contracts. It also is dependent on the postal rates that are charged for the package deliveries. His private company, Blue Origin, depends on government contracts to fund its space ventures.
INSKEEP: You, in your memoir of your time at The Washington Post, wrote very positively of Jeff Bezos’ support in difficult times. What do you make of his actions so far as we know here?
“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was made for other reasons not for high principle.
Yet Bezos resolutely supported the staff’s coverage during the Trump presidency (and has not interfered with reporting on his own business interests or personal life).
Did the post owner Jeff Bezos make this call? The denial was issued by the publisher and it appeared that Bezos did not. Four different sources are reporting that Bezos made the call according to The Washington Post’s reporters. Marty Baron is joining us. He’s a former editor of the Post who worked for Bezos. Good day, sir.
Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”
Hoffman says he intends to remain at the paper, saying he “refuses to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42 years.” He writes of being launched on several projects, including “the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”
The Washington Post editorial board has fallen to me to endorse a candidate of Donald Trump, as written by Molly Roberts and David Bezos
The editorial page chief held a meeting Monday with scores of staff in the opinion section, who pressed him on a number of topics, including appeals for Bezos to address them.
“We’re afraid of what Donald Trump will do and so we are bending the knee to him,” she said, noting that Blue Origin officials met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.
Bezos brought in Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.
The Telegraph in the U.K. is considered allied with the rightwing of the Conservative party by its editor, Lewis. He served as a top executive in London for Murdoch and was the publisher and chief executive of the Wall Street Journal. He was working as a consultant for the Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The letter, obtained by NPR, was written by Harold Hoffman and said that he thought we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. It’s unfair that we have lost our voice.
The Washington Post’s editorials have for decades been a beacon of light, signalling hope to dissidents, political prisoners and the voiceless, as evidenced by the decision of DavidHoffman to leave the editorial board. “When victims of repression were harassed, exiled, imprisoned and murdered, we made sure the whole world knew the truth.
The decision by Bezos was reported by NPR on Friday. In the days since, two columnists have resigned from the paper and two writers have stepped down from the editorial board.
Molly Roberts warned of the consequences if the editorial endorsing Harris hadn’t been published. She wrote on social media that Donald Trump is not yet a dictator. The closer he comes, the quieter we are.
Three of the top ten viewed stories on the Post website on Sunday were articles written by Post staffers who were angry with Bezos. The headline of the piece was, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” More than 174,000 people read it online.
The New York Times has a much higher circulation level, which makes for a lot of protests in the low thousands. The Post had a net gain of 4,000 subscribers, and the publisher boasted that it was noteworthy.
“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 said. “There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range of reporting by the Post’s journalists is some of the best.
Why was the Post? Why Did The Post Go Wall-to-Leading? What Happened When the Post Started to Shrink
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. “This gave people a reason to act on this mood.”
Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Marcus Brauchli was the former Post Executive Editor. People don’t know why the decision was made. We don’t know what happened, but we know the decision was made.
Well, I guess that’s a lesson for us all. This is what happens when you focus on yourself and not on the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, but they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitive, or product focused, or technology focused, or business model focused. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.
Bezos was focused on customer satisfaction at Amazon. He told people to do a better job of making customers happy. Here’s a funny quote from his letter to shareholders.
But I don’t expect the founder of Amazon to know this history any more than I expect him to understand how to operate The Post’s CMS. The trust in media is a distraction. The op-ed is a clear attempt to stop the bleeding. It’s too little and late.
Bezos wrote about the nosedive trust in media to back the decision. It is true that fewer people trust the media than before, but that may also be because people don’t necessarily know as many reporters anymore. In the days of healthy local journalism, reporters were your friends and neighbors, normal people that you interacted with on a regular basis at the grocery store. Journalists are thin and outnumbered by PR people, which is no longer the case. Fox News has gone out of its way to sow distrust. If you want to drum up Sub stack subscriptions, Dumping on other publications is the way to go.
To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. That is fifty times more cancellation than The Post had in a single weekend in a year.