JollyPieFedOver 200,000 subscribers flee 'Washington Post' after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement
Stopthatgirl7www.npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-5168416/washington…
*The Washington Post* has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.'s status as a privately held company.
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ThePowerOfGeekApparently profits die in the darkness too. Well done Bezos, you managed to piss off a huge chunk of your paper's subscriber base without winning over anyone from the other side.
It's Bezos trying to out-Musk Musk when it comes to boneheaded business decisions? A race to the stupidity bottom among the 21st century titans of business... What a time to be alive!
Amazon probably shits out more profits in a single day than the entirety of Washington Posts yearly running costs.
Jeff Bezos does not give a shit.
I bet you Amazon's New World MMORPG lost more money than all of these subscribers gave put together.
Jeff Bezos does not give a shit.
I suspect he only gives a shit about forcing Amazon Fullfilment employees to build some hideous bronze statue of him in space. "The peons will worship me!" he marvels, as they actually fill its cavernous hollow interior with bumslime.
Good point.
Also a good reminder for me (and probably others) to move away from Amazon. Not that there are that many other general e-tailer options.
Unfortunately whilst e-commerce is their main revenue earner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) that the e-commerce platform is built rakes in a good ~20% of their revenue. So not only do you have to convince enough people worldwide to stop buying on Amazon you also have to convince large corporations who use AWS cloud to move away as well.
It's like trying to organise people to stop using Google search. It's nearly impossible, but an admirable goal.
True. And AWS is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to reliability and scope of services offered. It's kind of insane.
Bezos probably does give a shit about using WaPo as influence though, so whilst he might not be losing money, he's certainly losing *influence* (however small that may be).
And it's not necessarily influence over the election, but influence over Amazon's presentation in WaPo to its readers.
If 10% of WaPo's subscribers aren't reading WaPo anymore, as is the implication with cancelling their subscription, then Bezos loses that influence, however small, with those people.
8% is not that huge a chunk. All they have to do is lay off 20% of staff, and they make it back with some margin. The quality of the reporting will suffer, but isn't it going to suffer regardless, now that we know that the owner is under Trump's tiny thumb?
Yeah, that's the real damage, honestly. The short-term loss of subscribers will pinch them. But the longer term reputational/credibility damage is the real problem.
They are never going to win over the right. They are basically doing what CNN tried - to play both sides. It didn't work for CNN, and it won't work for the WP.
RubberDuckBeing in Trumps good graces.. or at least bit on his bad side is something very valuable. The Dems will do NOTHING to the fascists and robber barons, but Trump will be a vengeful dictator. So this is the only logical thing to do for him.
I'd suggest if the Dems win, they actually step on the fascists instead of placating them. This means trials and prison.
you managed to piss off a huge chunk of your paper's subscriber base without winning over anyone from the other side
This never had anything to do with winning over MAGA voters. It was only ever about Bezos fearing retaliation from a future Trump administration if he manages to win a second term.
There's a reason people like Musk are bending over backwards to suck Trump's dick: They've all seen what happened to oligarchs in other countries who didn't bend the knee when a new dictator came to power. Putin is probably the best and most relevant recent example, but the "Saudi Arabian purge" is another, and similar things have been happening all over the world this century.
Hey, falling out of high windows is a very natural and common death!
It has nothing to do with ANYTHING else. You understand that, right comrade?
…. RIGHT?
I'm sure he'll be really sad when he fires all those people who work there, while this has 0 effect on how many yatchs he's planning to buy this year.
What newspapers are people looking at? I cancelled my subscription so I need a replacement.
For me, The Guardian is the current top of my list. But I'm really trying to find a good US based paper or news site.
I'm considering NPR as well.
I'm not necessarily against a weekly paper like The Economist. But it'd be different than my daily routine I've gotten used to. But there's solid arguments that a weekly routine for news is healthier.
TheTechnician27Honestly, I would say a news agency like the Associated Press is really good for national and international news. I'll say that I really like *The Atlantic*, but that's more of a news magazine than a traditional newspaper. If you want a good mix with minimal sources, I would say Associated Press and *The Guardian* for national and international news; *The Atlantic* for political analysis; *Mother Jones*/ProPublica for investigative journalism; and a big newspaper in your state for statewide news (especially a major metropolitan area). Just off the top of my head, but those are ones I'd choose if I needed just a single source for those things.
If you want, I highly recommend creating an RSS feed for multiple sources. I only started using it in 2024, but it works great.
Do you live in or near a major metropolitan area? Most cities have news publications of some repute (see the recent LA Times debacle). I recall Cleveland's The Plain Dealer being quite good in the past, and I'm currently subscribed to and satisfied with The Seattle Times, for example.
Ah yeah. There's this highly respected local paper around here called The Washington Post....
Shit.
The Guardian is a decent source. I recommend Democracy Now!, NPR (and any state-level equivalents), AP, Jacobin, Unicorn Riot, and outlets like that. There's also some genuinely good independent news on youtube, like Democracy@Work
Ladies, and Gentelmen welcome to the Finding Out portion of the program.
Not yet.
Trump needs to lose still. But if Bezos is thinking of a Trump win we need to think about news in a Trump America. Wash. Po bends the knee before Trump is even President so it's not going to be independent anymore.
And if Post isn't independent anymore pre-Trump, then it won't ever be independent moving forward.
Bezos is safe in any case. His actual money is in Amazon, not WashPo. This move to cancel is purely based on news and trust. I have no expectations that Jeff Bezos gives a shit about my subscription (or anyone else's for that matter)
There are worse actors than Wash Po. Twitter for example is far worse but is continuing to survive off the back of Elon Musk enormous wealth. It's seriously not looking good for media moving forward.
But that's also why we are here on Lemmy. A little rebellion of our own away from Reddit / Twitter / Facebook.
Newspaper media is the small fry today.
Bezos brought in Will 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.
What a little bitch. I cancelled my subscription over the weekend.
This Will Lewis is the one the Private Eye (British satirical news magazine) refers to as 'Thirsty', I assume in the sense that he drinks a lot. He might need to start drinking more right now.
AllNewTypeFaceThe moral of this story is that credibility is the one asset a newspaper has. Once you fritter that away, you’re left with nothing.
kamenLady.Cancel Amazon Prime, Not the Newspaper.
He blocked them.
let's be real, I think bezos is not too concerned, if trump wins, all the tax cuts for his companies will make up for this. what a cunt
Jure RepincIt would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass
Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.
“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,”
The two sentences that made me lol. Of course the consumer is shooting itself in the foot not subscribing to a journal whose integrity is in question after one of the oligarchy decided it needed to suppress an endorsement. If the consumers weren't shooting themselves, who else could it be? Certainly not the great Bezos!
Keeping the Washington Post is pennies for Bezos. It has been financially troubled since 2020. I highly doubt Bezos will care if a million subscribers flee. He keeps it for the same reason Elon bought Twitter.
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It would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass
Snot FlickermanOh, if only. AWS is fucking *huge* and dominates.
AWS is pretty far from dominating these days. Ms in particular has eaten up a lot of the cloud marketshare. It is huge but definitely not the overwhelming share that they used to have.
andyburkeThere are alternatives with better APIs. Or, you know, don't buy into the bullshit and rack up a few servers yourself.
Tired of this "oh, but I can't 😢😢😢."
Most people using AWS literally can't switch because most people work for someone else...I don't think corporate really gives a shit if I don't like the cloud platform we use
The "business" people in charge. Aka the people who don't contribute and mostly fuck shit up.
It's on us engineers to fix their shit thinking. You know they won't.
It does not have to be this way. Stop pretending it does so that you don't have to worry about it.
That mentality only works in the "adopting cloud" stage. Vendor lock-in is real, and AWS was doing what it does long before there even were competitors, let alone ones with feature parity.
If you start a job somewhere of any reasonable size with incumbent AWS infrastructure, switching to another provider will be an uphill struggle in the best possible circumstance and in most cases it will be a Sisyphean exercise that'll probably end up with you out of a job before the AWS bill goes down
This is one of the reasons I recommend using any provider that provides you with OpenStack when moving to the cloud.
If you join a company where you have no voice, then you're going to have a bad time and you may compromise your own morality to get that paycheck.
You can say that there are no other jobs to be had out there, but the current employment rate says you are wrong.
You don't *have* to let the business people make you into an amoral cog in a machine.
I have a voice in my role, but I'm not going to pretend I'm the only person at the company.
I'm more making the point that your single voice will not be sufficient to affect direction regarding cloud provider choice in a big enough company, that dice was probably already rolled a decade ago. I'm not saying it's impossible or anything, but you're gonna need to come up with an incredible business case for throwing away years of hundreds of engineers' work building on top of platform A for a costly switch to platform B all for no customer benefit.
I mean, vendor lock-in and lack of resiliency to a vendor-specific outage, maybe caused by some piece of their stack you have never nor will ever touch, or maybe the platform CEO decides your kind of company isn't expedient for their business anymore, are among the reasons why a company should never have ended up in that situation in the first place.
You can continue along that road of least resistance while ignoring all of the risks. That is up to you. You'll probably be fine. (Not joking, you'll be fine. But don't pretend like this is all *necessary*.)
And go where, Azure? GCP? They're still run by the same club.
The OpenStack website has a list of cloud providers who use OpenStack for their clouds. https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/
Cancel Prime.
Cancel Prime.
Cancel Prime.
So, uhh, I got prime when the pricing is glitched and it only cost me less than 2 dollars. If I sub to a twitch streamer Amazon is actually losing money 🗿
Akasazh
irotsomaIf only there was reasonable competition, or basically anywhere else I could get certain things without paying a crap load for shipping small things. Even in large cities there just aren't stores that sell certain things like electronics parts, high quality brand tools, etc. The big box stores just don't carry a lot of stuff. Not to mention soaps that I use for sensitive skin which places like Walmart doesn't carry, but the drug stores all got bought out and closed down and the few left now have mostly empty shelves, too. Without Amazon, I just can't get a lot of things I need or want without traveling hundreds or thousands of miles, and I live in a major city.
I mean, Bezos doesn't run that either. Might as well just stop using every stock in his portfolio by that logic.
Get Amazon employees to unionize and take back the ship is the answer there. Amazon is annoyingly too big to be affected by even a large grassroots protest.
The Post could lose all its subscribers and Bezos could still easily cover costs. He isn’t in the newspaper business for the money. He bought it for exactly moments like these. 8% is how much he just paid to hedge his bets
Flying SquidNo point covering costs if no one is reading.
Yeah I was being hyperbolic for effect, but the point is that he owns the WaPo so that he can use it for his own personal social and political gain, not to make money off of it. I doubt the WaPo readership will substantially drop from this. And I have many questions about the people who still read his rag
Serious question, but what stops the editors and writers who feel differently from just telling him no and printing what they want?
I understand he owns them and could fire them, but I think that would be more telling and a much bigger story internationally if he just fired or shut down WaPo for not doing his bidding rather than this subscriber loss being what we see. Journalists used to do real reporting and expose huge things (some still do), so if they actually feel this way about the candidate then they should’ve just printed what they wanted anyway.
ImADifferentBirdI mean, that's kind of what they did. The Post was absolutely flooded with opinion columns calling out the paper and Bezos for their cowardice, and most of their editorial board has resigned at this point.
Not much considering that's what the entire editorial staff did anyway.
But they don't get to control the headline at the top of the front page.
As I’m not in journalism, why couldn’t the most senior editor control the top headline and push out the views of the also believe the same?
I'm sure he could. But I'm guessing he's a corporate bootlicker.
csm10495I can't believe they have this many subs tbh
This is a huge number too. Apparently the NYT leadership was crowing about gaining 4000 subscriptions over a few months recently.
If gaining 4000 is considered a lot in the industry, losing 200,000 and growing is a roaring statement of disapproval.
CorkyskogAs of 2023 they had like 2.5 million subscribers, so it's like almost 10% That's pretty huge.
Ugh. I cancelled my subscription about 2 years ago after being a subscriber for almost a decade. Frankly, the quality of their reporting had taken a sharp nosedive. There was more and more opinion pieces and less actual facts. Which is a shame, because the WaPo used to be a really reliable source.
Although in this case, it allowed pretty much every opinion columnist to endorse Harris after Bezos blocked it.
Who tf was subscribed to that rag and was somehow not aware it was Bezos' propaganda factory? Or were they aware of it and just now decided to draw the line?
The paradox: if, instead, 200,000 newcomers were to *subscribe*, the WaPo might be economically viable and then it could fire its owner.
The WaPo is currently losing tens of millions of USD a year. That is not so much its fault as *our* fault. We are the ones who prefer to pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime than for quality journalism.
Most old media are loss-makers. The owners are fine with that because owning a newspaper allows you to influence public perceptions.
Why would I pay for news controlled by a billionaire? My tax money already goes towards CBC who are... probably better than WaPo.
It would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass
His real money comes from Amazon Web Services, and that's *really* hard to divest from, even if its customers (businesses rather than individuals) wanted to.
Yep. AWS is 2/3rds of the business. It's GOLIATH, and it's completely off the radar for most people while being completely ubiquitous. AWS is the real threat.
It's also completely unthreatened by public boycott. People who make the choice to continue using AWS do so because of vendor lock-in, and they either can't leave or are in a position where they agree with daddy bezos because they have money
"Democracy dies in darkness!"
(paywall)
Alexa, turn off the lights.
"I'm sorry, I cannot connect to Light at the End of the Tunnel".
Unsurprising. Selling to Bezos was obviously a future trainwreck waiting to happen.
Terrible business decision. Jeff doesn't seem qualified to run a newspaper.
He doesn't run it, he just owns it.
The moment he made a decision for the paper he stepped out from just owning into the realm of running it.
Sure, but it's not like he runs the company, he just made a singular shitty decision.
Why are you stanning for bezos?
Probably not the last one
Good. He shouldn't be making any business decisions for a newspaper.
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