Right Call, Wrong Time: The Washington Post’s $10M+ Mistake

By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly

Opinions are great for subscription businesses until they’re not. As the Washington Post learned, the absence of an opinion is just as bad as having one.

Last week, CEO Will Lewis announced that its editorial board would no longer be endorsing candidates for president, despite being ready to give one to Kamala Harris. As he stated in the announcement:

The Washington Post will not make an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

And it’s having an immediate impact on its business. According to NPR:

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

Making fundamental changes to your editorial process two weeks out from an election isn’t the wisest decision. And there is no doubt in my mind that this decision was a basic calculation. The Washington Post generates far less revenue for Jeff Bezos than any of the contracts he has with the government. He was afraid. While he hasn’t meddled in the news side of things, he felt that a blatant endorsement was a step too far for the organization that he owns.

With that said, Lewis and Bezos are 100% correct to get out of the endorsement business. It does nothing to help trust in media. Newspapers should be in the business of reporting on what happened and contextualizing that information for readers. But when newspapers offer their opinions, even though it is a different department than the core reporting team, it confuses people. That leads to a loss of faith in the publication’s objectivity.

Look at the two screenshots from the Washington Post on Monday. The first is a news article talking about climate change.

And then here is the second, which is an opinion about lead pipes going away (can’t believe we’re still discussing this).

What’s the difference? Opinion. But whose opinion is it? The Washington Post’s Editorial Board. Readers don’t know what this means. They don’t understand that there are some people who sit on a board writing opinions and an entirely different department that goes out and reports the news. There is no reason why they’d understand that they’re totally separate and don’t work together. All they see is The Washington Post and opinion and go, “well, this must be what everyone thinks.”

This is just asking for trouble. When the average reader sees an article that says, “The Washington Post Endorses Kamala Harris as President,” they assume that the entire organization endorses her. When a reporter publishes a story that is critical about Donald Trump, that same reader might say, “well, of course they wrote this, the Washington Post is for Kamala Harris.”

In an era of low media trust, this exacerbates the problem. Ironically, Jeff Bezos agrees. He wrote an article Monday night and said:

What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

This is why Axios opted to not allow any opinions on its website. According to its Bill of Rights, “Every item will be written or produced to inform, analyze and explain. We will never have an opinion section.” I reached out to CEO Jim VandeHei to ask why this was the case and he said:

The world is awash in noise and opinion. We didn’t think it needed more of it. Just as importantly, as a new publication, we wanted to do everything in our power to win the trust of readers regardless of their politics. Opinion complicates that, because many people don’t differentiate between the editorial page and the reported content.

My thoughts exactly.

Here’s the problem… because of years—decades even—of eroding trust in the media, an entire group of people no longer reads the Washington Post. They don’t view it as a viable source of information. You can pound your chest, say they’re wrong, but at the end of the day, they’re voting with their eyes and choosing not to read and spend with the Washington Post. And deciding to stop presidential endorsements while still running an editorial board doesn’t help.

The New York Times is the exact same way. It has built an incredible subscription business, but it has a core audience. Brian Goldberg, CEO of consumer media company BDG said something interesting in that NY Mag piece from last week:

They pivoted from being a newspaper for everyone to being a newspaper for their core reader. From a purely business standpoint, that was the right decision, but I also think it made the world a much worse place, and that’s a difficult thing to reconcile.

And so, when you have a core reader, you have an obligation as a business to give that core reader what they want. In the case of the Washington Post, that was both an endorsement by the editorial board and an expectation that the billionaire owner wouldn’t get involved. When those two things weren’t honored, the customer got angry.

This is the ultimate result of being subscription first. It’s a great model until your subscriber gets mad at you. Then, they start churning. Typically, cancel culture is pretty small. In this case, two weeks out, the Washington Post has likely seen over $10 million (see correction below) in revenue disappear (not immediately, but as subscriptions churn).

There is no easy way out of this. The pessimist in me sees a tailspin with this. Lose all of that money, the Post has to cut back on journalists, which makes the product weaker, which means more people churn, and then return to the start of this sentence.

The optimist in me thinks it’s going to take time. Bezos has, reportedly, never interfered in the core news business. That’s a good thing. And so long as that remains, people will hopefully come back. But I would encourage every media company—especially in controversial topics like politics—to think very hard about having opinion sections. It may be good for business, but it’s very hard for trust.

P.S. I recognize the irony of writing an opinion piece about how opinions suck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Correction: The original story said that it was a $100m+ mistake when, in fact, it’s estimated that this is a $10m+ mistake. 200,000 subscribers churning at $50 per subscriber is $10 million. Since this story published, NPR reports that the number of churned subscribers has increased to 250,000, which means this could be pushing $15-20m in lost subscriber revenue (especially if the LTV per subscriber is greater than $50).