Apparently profits die in the darkness too. Well done Bezos, you managed to piss off a huge chunk of your paper’s subscriber base without winning over anyone from the other side.
It’s Bezos trying to out-Musk Musk when it comes to boneheaded business decisions? A race to the stupidity bottom among the 21st century titans of business… What a time to be alive!
Amazon probably shits out more profits in a single day than the entirety of Washington Posts yearly running costs.
Jeff Bezos does not give a shit.
I bet you Amazon’s New World MMORPG lost more money than all of these subscribers gave put together.
Bezos probably does give a shit about using WaPo as influence though, so whilst he might not be losing money, he’s certainly losing influence (however small that may be).
And it’s not necessarily influence over the election, but influence over Amazon’s presentation in WaPo to its readers.
If 10% of WaPo’s subscribers aren’t reading WaPo anymore, as is the implication with cancelling their subscription, then Bezos loses that influence, however small, with those people.
Good point.
Also a good reminder for me (and probably others) to move away from Amazon. Not that there are that many other general e-tailer options.
Unfortunately whilst e-commerce is their main revenue earner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) that the e-commerce platform is built rakes in a good ~20% of their revenue. So not only do you have to convince enough people worldwide to stop buying on Amazon you also have to convince large corporations who use AWS cloud to move away as well.
It’s like trying to organise people to stop using Google search. It’s nearly impossible, but an admirable goal.
True. And AWS is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to reliability and scope of services offered. It’s kind of insane.
Jeff Bezos does not give a shit.
I suspect he only gives a shit about forcing Amazon Fullfilment employees to build some hideous bronze statue of him in space. “The peons will worship me!” he marvels, as they actually fill its cavernous hollow interior with bumslime.
Being in Trumps good graces… or at least bit on his bad side is something very valuable. The Dems will do NOTHING to the fascists and robber barons, but Trump will be a vengeful dictator. So this is the only logical thing to do for him.
I’d suggest if the Dems win, they actually step on the fascists instead of placating them. This means trials and prison.
8% is not that huge a chunk. All they have to do is lay off 20% of staff, and they make it back with some margin. The quality of the reporting will suffer, but isn’t it going to suffer regardless, now that we know that the owner is under Trump’s tiny thumb?
Yeah, that’s the real damage, honestly. The short-term loss of subscribers will pinch them. But the longer term reputational/credibility damage is the real problem.
They are never going to win over the right. They are basically doing what CNN tried - to play both sides. It didn’t work for CNN, and it won’t work for the WP.
you managed to piss off a huge chunk of your paper’s subscriber base without winning over anyone from the other side
This never had anything to do with winning over MAGA voters. It was only ever about Bezos fearing retaliation from a future Trump administration if he manages to win a second term.
There’s a reason people like Musk are bending over backwards to suck Trump’s dick: They’ve all seen what happened to oligarchs in other countries who didn’t bend the knee when a new dictator came to power. Putin is probably the best and most relevant recent example, but the “Saudi Arabian purge” is another, and similar things have been happening all over the world this century.
Hey, falling out of high windows is a very natural and common death!
It has nothing to do with ANYTHING else. You understand that, right comrade?
…. RIGHT?
I’m sure he’ll be really sad when he fires all those people who work there, while this has 0 effect on how many yatchs he’s planning to buy this year.
let’s be real, I think bezos is not too concerned, if trump wins, all the tax cuts for his companies will make up for this. what a cunt
What newspapers are people looking at? I cancelled my subscription so I need a replacement.
For me, The Guardian is the current top of my list. But I’m really trying to find a good US based paper or news site.
I’m considering NPR as well.
I’m not necessarily against a weekly paper like The Economist. But it’d be different than my daily routine I’ve gotten used to. But there’s solid arguments that a weekly routine for news is healthier.
Honestly, I would say a news agency like the Associated Press is really good for national and international news. I’ll say that I really like The Atlantic, but that’s more of a news magazine than a traditional newspaper. If you want a good mix with minimal sources, I would say Associated Press and The Guardian for national and international news; The Atlantic for political analysis; Mother Jones/ProPublica for investigative journalism; and a big newspaper in your state for statewide news (especially a major metropolitan area). Just off the top of my head, but those are ones I’d choose if I needed just a single source for those things.
If you want, I highly recommend creating an RSS feed for multiple sources. I only started using it in 2024, but it works great.
Do you live in or near a major metropolitan area? Most cities have news publications of some repute (see the recent LA Times debacle). I recall Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer being quite good in the past, and I’m currently subscribed to and satisfied with The Seattle Times, for example.
Ah yeah. There’s this highly respected local paper around here called The Washington Post…
Shit.
Reuters is free, and it’s just about as unbiased as you can get.
AP a close second.
The Guardian is a decent source. I recommend Democracy Now!, NPR (and any state-level equivalents), AP, Jacobin, Unicorn Riot, and outlets like that. There’s also some genuinely good independent news on youtube, like Democracy@Work
I usually go with APNews and NPR radio. Some Al Jazeera for more international reports.
Guardian, Al-jazeera, AP, Reuters for me
And then the locals
Ladies, and Gentelmen welcome to the Finding Out portion of the program.
Not yet.
Trump needs to lose still. But if Bezos is thinking of a Trump win we need to think about news in a Trump America. Wash. Po bends the knee before Trump is even President so it’s not going to be independent anymore.
And if Post isn’t independent anymore pre-Trump, then it won’t ever be independent moving forward.
Bezos is safe in any case. His actual money is in Amazon, not WashPo. This move to cancel is purely based on news and trust. I have no expectations that Jeff Bezos gives a shit about my subscription (or anyone else’s for that matter)
There are worse actors than Wash Po. Twitter for example is far worse but is continuing to survive off the back of Elon Musk enormous wealth. It’s seriously not looking good for media moving forward.
But that’s also why we are here on Lemmy. A little rebellion of our own away from Reddit / Twitter / Facebook.
Newspaper media is the small fry today.
Bezos brought in Will Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.
What a little bitch. I cancelled my subscription over the weekend.
This Will Lewis is the one the Private Eye (British satirical news magazine) refers to as ‘Thirsty’, I assume in the sense that he drinks a lot. He might need to start drinking more right now.
200,000 is A LOTTTT
The moral of this story is that credibility is the one asset a newspaper has. Once you fritter that away, you’re left with nothing.
Cancel Amazon Prime, Not the Newspaper.
He blocked them.
Yeah! Cancel PRIME!
Laughs in AWS.
As a developer it’s quite shocking the grip AWS has on the internet. I run a side business that’s AWS-free and loving it, but its tentacles are probably behind everything I use as an end-user. Everything at my full-time job is built on AWS.
It would hurt this sociopath Bezos a lot more if people also canceled Amazon services en mass
Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.
“It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,”
The two sentences that made me lol. Of course the consumer is shooting itself in the foot not subscribing to a journal whose integrity is in question after one of the oligarchy decided it needed to suppress an endorsement. If the consumers weren’t shooting themselves, who else could it be? Certainly not the great Bezos!
Keeping the Washington Post is pennies for Bezos. It has been financially troubled since 2020. I highly doubt Bezos will care if a million subscribers flee. He keeps it for the same reason Elon bought Twitter.
