The Washington Post has reportedly lost tens of thousands of subscribers in an apparent reaction to a decision by the outlet’s billionaire owner to change the editorial focus of its Opinion Pages.
The Post has lost 75,000 digital subscribers since its owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced changes were coming to the Post Opinion section, NPR reported on Friday citing internal subscriber figures.
Bezos on Wednesday wrote to Post staff saying its opinion section would moving forward only focus on “free markets and personal liberties,” and adding the newspaper will no longer publish op-eds that are not supportive of those ideals.
“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos said. “Today, the internet does that job.”
The change led to the departure of longtime Op-Ed editor David Shipley, who NPR reported had sought to convince Bezos against making the change.
Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis, in his own note to staff which was obtained by The Hill, welcomed Bezos’ decision, saying “this is not about siding with any political party.”
The Post did not respond to a request for comment.
Wednesday’s news came just months after the Post lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers after Bezos made a separate decision to kill an editorial backing former Vice President Kamala Harris in last November’s election that the newspaper’s editors were preparing to publish.
A source at the Post last month downplayed the outlet’s subscriber losses to The Hill and said it had won back 20 percent of the subscriptions lost after the Harris editorial was scrapped.
Bezos, who attended President Trump’s inauguration last month and has spoken optimistically about Trump’s second term, has sought to cast doubt on accusations he is trying to curry favor with the current administration to help his vast business empire.
“Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials,” he wrote in the newspaper last fall. “I once wrote that The Post is a ‘complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.”
