By all accounts, The Washington Post has lost hundreds of thousands of hard-won subscribers over the past two years, ever since its owner, Jeff Bezos, decided to reshape its editorial pages and bludgeon its news staff. Friends and neighbors, including former Post colleagues, have canceled subscriptions in protest and disappointment.
Some have urged me to do so, too. But I’m not going to.
As a reporter who spent more than half his life employed by the paper, I’ve grieved as much as anyone over the paper’s dismantling under Bezos and his feckless former publisher, Will Lewis. I’ve watched in dismay as The Post’s vital signs have fluttered and ebbed. Its once-heralded sports section is now an insult to passionate local fans. Its Metro section — reduced to fewer than two dozen journalists — is a historic embarrassment to an institution that prided itself on its local coverage. So, too, is the loss of feature writers, books and arts coverage and commentary, and a legendary photography staff.
Hundreds of talented people have left, either voluntarily or not. The Post still does fine investigative and enterprise reporting and maintains an excellent national staff. But that is about all it has maintained.
To be sure, two of the biggest waves of subscriber cancellations predated Bezos’ gutting of nearly half the newsroom on Feb. 4. The first occurred after Bezos decided, just days before the election in 2024, that The Post would end its practice of endorsing presidential candidates (it had been set to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris). A second, lesser wave followed a few months later when Bezos announced that The Post’s editorial pages would henceforth emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” an ambiguous agenda that many readers apparently interpreted as a cynical ploy to curry favor with President Donald Trump and his incoming administration.
Just five years ago, The Post boasted that it had 3 million print and digital subscribers, a handsome figure. It has been so battered by customer defections since then that it stopped publicly releasing figures. While competitors like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal keep growing, proving there’s still life in “legacy” print organizations, The Post keeps slipping.
No one is required to spend money on something they consider damaged, flawed or inferior. No one would buy a car, a stock or a box of cereal if they thought it was shoddy or if there were better alternatives. It’s not just irrational to do so but counterproductive; sticking with a lousy “product” sends the message to its producer that all is well, no change is necessary.
Over the past few decades, millions of Americans have decided that their local newspaper is like that — damaged, flawed or inferior. They have decided there are better ways to get news or to not bother getting it at all. Either way, every canceled subscription becomes part of a chain reaction, a doom loop. Canceled subscriptions lead to the next cutback, which weakens the paper, which leads to more canceled subscriptions, which leads to more cuts, and so on into bankruptcy. Bezos’ decision to change The Post’s editorial pages in late 2024 and 2025 contributed directly to the mass layoffs in early 2026.
When I mention that I’ve stuck with The Post, my friends and neighbors often seem perplexed. I still have a digital subscription, and a print one, as I’ve had since I started at The Post in 1988 and since taking a buyout and leaving at the end of 2023.
For all the mismanagement, indifference and boneheaded decisions involving The Post, I know that withdrawing my little contribution to its bottom line will add to the same self-fulfilling prophecy that has wrecked the rest of the newspaper industry. Sure, I’d save a few bucks and register my disapproval. But The Post would be injured further. With each quarterly downward tick in subscription revenue and audience loss, Bezos — so reluctant to commit any more of his own vast fortune to The Post — will cut even further.
Holding on this way may be irrational. It may be rewarding bad decisions, clueless management and an ever-weaker “product.” But it may also buy time, and time offers one of the few hopes for reinvention and rebuilding. The alternative ensures that a bad thing will only become worse.
This was originally published at Poynter.org.
