The Washington Post reportedly lost tens of thousands of subscribers in an apparent response to the outlet's billionaire owner's decision to change the editorial focus of its opinion page.
The post has lost 75,000 digital subscribers since owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that changes were coming to NPR's opinion paper. Reported on Friday We will quote internal subscriber numbers.
On Wednesday, Bezos wrote staff to post staff saying that the opinion section would only focus on “free markets and individual freedoms.” Adding newspapers will prevent the publication of OP-EDS that do not support these ideals.
“There was a time when newspapers, especially those that were local monopoly, could have seen them as services that brought a wider opinion section to the reader's doorstep every morning, trying to cover all opinions,” Bezos said. “The Internet is doing that job today.”
The change led to the NPR's reporting of longtime OP-ED editor David Shipley.
Publisher and CEO Will Lewis welcomed Bezos' decision in his own memo to staff obtained from the hill, saying, “This is not about siding with political parties.”
The post declined to comment.
Wednesday's news came just months after Bezos made another decision to kill editorial supporter Vice President Kamala Harris in the election last November, where newspaper editors were preparing to publish.
The post, like many news organizations, hopes that the so-called “Trump Bump” will drive more news stories and lead to an increase in audiences.
A post source told Hill on Friday that the outlet sold more subscriptions in the first six weeks of 2025 than the entire first quarter of 2025, and nearly twice as many subscription figures as in February this month before.
Bezos, who attended President Trump's inauguration last month and spoke optimistic about Trump's second term, tried to question the accusations that he was trying to curry favor with the current administration to help his vast business empire.
“Every day, somewhere, someone from an Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive, or from another charity or business I own or invest in, meets with government officials,” he wrote in the newspaper last fall. “I once wrote that this post is a 'complicated device' for me. Yes, but I also see that it is the complexity of the post. ”
Update: 1:37pm
