A new trainee hack at the Washington Post has had a troubled debut with his first piece for the august organ. The paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, wrote an article for the paper explaining why he blocked its editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris.
The Amazon founder has taken his new role seriously, identifying himself as a journalist instead of a businessman who owns a newspaper (it is not clear whether he has got his shorthand yet). In his opening paragraph he bemoans that “our profession is now the least trusted of all” and “something we are doing is clearly not working”.
Blocking the endorsement was, he said, the right decision to win back public trust. Sadly for Bezos, his subscribers felt somewhat differently – a whopping 200,000 cancelled their subscriptions over the weekend, representing more than 8% of the paper’s dedicated readers.
The exodus dramatically reverses the paper’s meagre 4,000 increase in subscribers in the year to date, spelling new headaches for publisher and ex-Telegraph editor Will Lewis, who was brought in to increase its flagging subs.
Bezos is telling the subscribers that he is right and they are wrong when it comes to trust, though they may agree with him when he says: “I am not an ideal owner of the Post”. The comments thread below his piece – which his loyal staff have kept open – might make for uncomfortable reading, too.
“You were blackmailed and caved you gutless garbage seller,” one reader wrote. “Glad I unsubscribed,” said another. “You have destroyed the reputation of this newspaper forever,” a third concluded.
The mission to restore the public’s trust might not quite be accomplished just yet, then.
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