The number of subscription losses for The Washington Post surpassed 250,000 on Tuesday, four days after the newspaper announced it wouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election.
The company so far has not commented on the figures, which were first reported by NPR.
The Post reported the cancellations amount to about 10% of digital subscribers, while noting the reported numbers don’t take into consideration any new subscriptions during that time frame or people who may have changed their mind on cancelling.
During a call with members of the newsroom Tuesday, Post Executive Editor Matt Murray conceded the loss of subscribers could be “substantial.”
“There’s a view that the numbers are going to be bumpy and rough for a couple weeks, and we’ll see how they settle down,” Murray said. “I think everybody’s trying to just take a few weeks to see where the numbers all come out.”
Murray’s comments come after Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, authored an op-ed seeking to explain and defend the controversial decision to readers.
Bezos seemed to acknowledge the poor timing but insisted there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” that factored into the call after it was reported that executives from his Blue Origin company met with members of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s team on Friday, the same day the Post announced it wasn’t endorsing any candidate in the presidential race.
“There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false,” Bezos wrote.
Will Lewis, the publisher of the Post, on Friday told readers the call was “consistent with the values” of the paper and a “statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this.”
Behind the scenes, though, Lewis along with David Shipley, the editor of the Opinion section, had unsuccessfully tried to convince Bezos it would be a mistake to kill the presidential endorsement this close to Election Day, according to The New York Times. The Post’s editorial board had already decided to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, when Bezos decided to kill the endorsement, the Post reported.
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In a statement on Saturday, Lewis clarified Bezos had never seen a draft of a potential endorsement.
The Post’s move came after The Los Angeles Times announced it wouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate in this election at the direction of its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, receiving similar blowback from readers.
Semafor reported the Los Angeles Times has lost over 18,000 of its under 400,000 “direct subscriptions” after the announcement.
Soon-Shiong defended the decision, saying he had instead offered the board the option to do a side-to-side analysis of each candidate’s policies but said it refused.
Mariel Garza, who resigned from her role as head of paper’s editorial board in the wake of the decision, refuted Soon-Shiong’s account.