The Scoop
The wave of canceled subscriptions to the Washington Post marks the end of an era in which news organizations marketed themselves as the flaming sword of democracy in a darkening Trump era.
NPR reported that the Post lost more than 200,000 subscribers in the last three days since ending a 50-year tradition of presidential endorsements. Semafor hasn’t independently confirmed that figure, but has been told by Post sources of a dramatic dip in the publication’s 2.5 million paid circulation.
Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times lost more than 18,000 of its fewer than 400,000 direct subscriptions in the week after a similar non-endorsement decision by its own wealthy owner, three people familiar with that data said.
Ben’s view
The consumer backlash to the Post reveals the extent to which the publication’s positioning against Trump was — in a literal, rather than cynical sense — marketing.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t necessarily feel they needed the Post’s journalism or its service products, but they did want Journalism with a capital J, a force willing to take Trump on directly and to absorb his wrath when other institutions weren’t.
And so the Post sold Journalism, and at least a large subset of its subscribers bought it.
The Post wasn’t alone. A whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it opened up the doors of American philanthropy to investigative outlets led by ProPublica and a new generation of local investment including the American Journalism Project, which helped channel big money into local news. Other explicitly progressive news organizations, led by the Guardian, also thrived on this model, delivering the ideologically-tinged journalism they promised. (The Guardian this week raised more than $1.5 million appealing to people dismayed by the Post’s shift.)
The thing with marketing, though, is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.
The journalists at the most successful of those projects made a promise to big donors and small subscribers that they’d produce work of value to civic life — to keeping corporations honest, or to keeping citizens informed. And donors and subscribers believed and paid, whether or not they read them every day.
The Washington Post, however, did not like to see itself as philanthropy in the business of resisting Donald Trump, whatever its marketing seemed to imply.
On the business side, Bezos, for a time, imagined he was transforming into a tech company, a push that quietly fizzled last year.