Opinion: Why I won’t cancel my subscription to The Washington Post

By Jackie Spinner

Earlier this year, Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s new publisher and CEO, disclosed in a staff meeting that the Post had lost nearly half of its digital subscribers since the peak of 2020 when Donald Trump was still president and the COVID-19 pandemic was raging.

The Post had already announced that it planned to reduce staff to offset deep losses in revenue. These were the first major job cuts since 2013 when Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, bought The Post for $250 million.

His purchase of the Post from the Graham family brought in a wave of cash and hope that my former employer would figure out how to make money and survive. There is a reason we call it the news “business.” It is one, and it takes money to hold the government accountable, to investigate wrongdoing, to cover local crime and school boards, to send a reporter into a community to find an inspiring story.

But for Bezos and other billionaires like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million, these venerable institutions in American journalism have been costly to run and have lost them millions of dollars. The Post’s losses in 2023 were $77 million

Like my colleagues, many still at the Post and many more who have left in recent years, like tens of thousands of readers who have weighed in through the comments on the Post website, I am shocked and angry by the news that 11 days before an election, the Post will not offer a presidential endorsement this year. 

The Post’s editorial board had written an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris but was stopped by its publisher and presumably by its owner, Bezos, from running it. (Bezos has since written an explanation of his decision that has drawn further criticism.) Days earlier at the Los Angeles Times, Soon-Shiong also blocked that paper from running an endorsement of Harris.

Since then my social media feed has been filled with people registering their outrage by announcing they have canceled their Post subscriptions. It’s unclear how many subscriptions the Post has lost because of this. 

But I know this. I’m keeping my Post digital subscription.

Right now, more than ever, my former colleagues in the newsroom, who work independently from the publisher and CEO, need my support to do their journalism.

The more than 250,000 readers who walked away from the Post in the last days in justified disgust missed this blockbuster exclusive about Elon Musk and how he launched his career working illegally. 

They missed that the opinion staff is fighting back against the decision by their CEO and publisher, raising questions about why the head of the editorial page allowed this to happen in the first place and didn’t resign in protest. None of us who knew and worked with Fred Hiatt, the late editorial page editor of the paper, could imagine this would have happened with complicity when he was there. 

They missed the condemnation of the Post’s decision signed by 18 columnists.

They missed the cartoons.

My colleagues who are left at the Post are caught in the middle. They are editorially independent of the publisher and owner. As Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Carol Leonnig wrote on X, “I’m a reporter and I don’t care who the Post’s ed board endorses. A fearless independent newsroom — which we’ve so far enjoyed under Jeff Bezos’ ownership — is what I hope we will maintain.” All of Leonnig’s posts on X about this are worth reading.

Perhaps it’s hard for readers to understand this — and certainly we bear responsibility in journalism for not explaining better – but most reporters work independently from the opinion staff. In my 14 years at the Washington Post, including when I was Baghdad bureau chief, I never was censored, talked out of a story or directed to write something my reporting didn’t support.

One time when I was covering a congressional hearing as a business reporter, a source refused to talk to me because of an editorial the Post had published that morning about the Iraq war. They started to tell me about the editorial, and I stopped them. What my newspaper “thought” played no part in what I was reporting.

While I respect the collective action of a boycott, of withholding subscription dollars from Bezos to make a statement about the non-endorsement — and yes, the timing of it — the fact is that Bezos did not buy the Post to make money. The loss of subscription dollars, your subscription dollars, may well hurt the bottom line of the Post, just as the losses did in 2023.

But all it really does is threaten the ability of the newsroom to continue to produce journalism.

It hurts people like my mentor David E. Hoffman, a member of the editorial board who resigned this week with two others. A few days before the blockbuster news about the non-endorsement, Hoffman was in New York to accept the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for The Washington Post’s series “Annals of Autocracy.” 

It hurts Steve Hendrix, the Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief. It hurts Jenna Portnoy, who covers local health care. It hurts Jasmine Hilton, a metro reporter who covers crime. It hurts Keith Alexander who covers D.C. superior court. It hurts Debbi Wilgoren who describes herself as a “Washington Post lifer.” It hurts all the Post reporters who put themselves in harm’s way covering the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Readers complain about diminished news in their papers, about why a reporter didn’t show up, about a meeting that goes uncovered. The fact is that it costs to employ people and to send them on assignment. Producing news requires money. Paying people what they’re worth requires money. 

While I know opinion coverage – but doubtfully endorsements — drive people to subscribe to a newspaper, it’s hard to see how the wave of mass cancellations will reverse the endorsement decision.

The Post’s endorsement was never going to change the outcome of the election. But voting can. There also is collective power in going to vote, in canvassing, in taking real action that could impact the election. There is collective power in supporting news reporting that could alter the outcome of an election. 

Regardless, the damage is done, and the people most hurt by this are the ones who are left trying to carry on the tradition of Washington Post excellence, which I still believe in, which I’m still willing to pay for. 

Editor’s Note: This column has been updated with resignations, number of subscription cancellations and Bezo’s response.

Jackie Spinner is the editor of GJR and was a staff writer at The Washington Post for 14 years. 

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