WaPo staffer unsure paper can recover as Bezos-owned outlet sheds 200,000 subscribers over endorsement fiasco
A Washington Post insider tells Fox News Digital the report about major losses in subscribers was "the talk of the newsroom" and expressed uncertainty whether the paper can recover.
The Washington Post is reportedly paying the price with its liberal readers after the Bezos-owned paper announced it would not be making an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, which has sent shockwaves in its newsroom.
NPR reported Monday that The Post has shed more than a whopping 200,000 subscribers since it revealed its editorial board would not formally endorse Vice President Kamala Harris after it had planned to do so.
According to NPR, it marks roughly an 8% loss of The Post's 2.5 million paid subscribers.
A veteran Washington Post insider tells Fox News Digital that the NPR report was "the talk of the newsroom."
"People are outraged at such a boneheaded decision," the insider said. "Just recently, [Washington Post CEO and publisher Will] Lewis’ team was bragging about stemming subscription losses and how we had 'green shoots' of a gain of 4,000 subscribers so far this year. That’s been wiped out in a nanosecond."
"It’s a steep hole to climb out of, and it’s only going to get worse once the election is over and more people cancel," the source added.
When asked whether the Post can climb out of the hole or if the damage is done, they replied "No idea. A lot of damage has been done."
A spokesperson for The Washington Post declined to comment.
A trio of Post reporters wrote Sunday that positive internal momentum at their place of employment "came to a halt" on Friday when Lewis declared the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" paper would not endorse a presidential candidate. In the days since, an onslaught of readers posted on social media about canceling subscriptions in protest, prompting Washington Post reporters to fret over how many subscribers would ultimately walk away.
"A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions," Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia, Herb Scribner and Laura Wagner wrote in a piece headlined "For The Post, more outrage from readers who say they’ve canceled."
"On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing," the Post reporters continued. "It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee."
The Post also noted that Lewis has "sought to tamp down speculation" that the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, made the decision in order to help former President Trump. However, The Post previously reported that Bezos was behind the move "according to four people who were briefed on the decision."
Lewis has claimed the decision to end presidential endorsements "was made entirely internally and neither campaign nor candidate was given a heads up or consulted," and has told concerned staffers that "it is the wrong thing for an independent newspaper to tell readers how to vote in a presidential election."
The Post announced on Friday that it would not be offering an endorsement in the upcoming presidential election or any future one, in what publisher Lewis said was a "returning to our roots."
An endorsement of Harris was reportedly drafted and ready to publish before it was suddenly shelved. The paper, which has been reliably hostile to former President Trump for years, has endorsed a Democrat for president in every election since 1976, except for when it skipped one in 1988.
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.
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