Sad! Not good!
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 roughly 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
You love to picture the WaPo data guys waking up on Monday and seeing those numbers on their screens:
Even veteran Post workers are shocked by the data:
'It's a colossal number,' former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli 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.'
It was just last week that the paper unexpectedly decided to not throw its hat in Kamala's ring:
'We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,' Will Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published on the paper's website.
Amazing that the paper opted to "return to its roots" this year, when the Democratic ticket was arguably the most embarrassing in the party's history!
I guess the Post took one look at the choice between (a) actually endorsing the competent, capable Republican candidate, or (b) endorsing the laughably inept and incompetent Democratic train wreck, and they were like:
You can understand why they found themselves in a pickle. I guess 200,000 subscribers didn't feel the same way, though.
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