The Washington Post is facing a major crisis, with massive subscriber cancellations and columnists quitting after owner Jeff Bezos stopped the paper from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
According to a report by NPR, two insiders at the paper said over 200,000 people had cancelled their digital subscriptions as of Monday evening (WAT). While some cancellations won’t take effect right away, this number represents about 8% of the paper’s total 2.5 million subscribers (including both digital and print). The cancellations were still increasing Monday afternoon.
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“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.”
The mass cancellations point “to the polarisation 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.”
Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.
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