text: The wave of canceled subscriptions to the Washington Post marks the end of an era in which news organizations marketed themselves as the flaming sword of democracy in a darkening Trump era.
  NPR reported that the Post lost more than 200,000 subscribers in the last three days since ending a 50-year tradition of presidential endorsements. Semafor hasn’t independently confirmed that figure, but has been told by Post sources of a dramatic dip in the publication’s 2.5 million paid circulation.
  Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times lost more than 18,000 of its fewer than 400,000 direct subscriptions in the week after a similar non-endorsement decision by its own wealthy owner, three people familiar with that data said.
  The consumer backlash to the Post reveals the extent to which the publication’s positioning against Trump was — in a literal, rather than cynical sense — marketing.
  Hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t necessarily feel they needed the Post’s journalism or its service products, but they did want Journalism with a capital J, a force willing to take Trump on directly and to absorb his wrath when other institutions weren’t.
  And so the Post sold Journalism, and at least a large subset of its subscribers bought it.
  The Post wasn’t alone. A whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it opened up the doors of American philanthropy to investigative outlets led by ProPublica and a new generation of local investment including the American Journalism Project, which helped channel big money into local news. Other explicitly progressive news organizations, led by the Guardian, also thrived on this model, delivering the ideologically-tinged journalism they promised. (The Guardian this week raised more than $1.5 million appealing to people dismayed by the Post’s shift.)
  The thing with marketing, though, is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.
  The journalists at the most successful of those projects made a promise to big donors and small subscribers that they’d produce work of value to civic life — to keeping corporations honest, or to keeping citizens informed. And donors and subscribers believed and paid, whether or not they read them every day.
  The Washington Post, however, did not like to see itself as philanthropy in the business of resisting Donald Trump, whatever its marketing seemed to imply.
  On the business side, Bezos, for a time, imagined he was transforming into a tech company, a push that quietly fizzled last year.
  The newsroom had an ambivalent relationship with its identity as a Resistance outlet — they’re proud of work that challenges power, and it’s always nice to be loved — but they certainly never really believed that they were being employed by the social media users who complain New York Times headlines are too right-wing.
  We learned Monday that, in fact, a share of the Post’s subscribers seemed to be there for the mission, not necessarily the content.
  And it was, as much as anything else, a clarifying lesson in how you sell news.
  “You’re trying to get people to subscribe and you need some construct, some truth, some fundamental point of difference to get people to pay,” said Andrew Essex, the former CEO of Droga5 and a marketing consultant who did work for the Post earlier in the Bezos era. “They may have just yanked out a critical leg of the stool.”
  Bezos and his publisher Will Lewis have signaled in a thousand ways that they have little interest in continuing to sell confrontation with Donald Trump. They would like to be running a different kind of publication, something a bit more like Emma Tucker’s Wall Street Journal — combative and courageous, without any partisan alignment or an institutional view of Trump as a special threat to democracy or a free press.
  Now, by abruptly firing their existing audience in the moments before an election, they’ve been able to make that statement clearly. What’s next is a frantic scramble to find paying customers who can be persuaded that they need the Washington Post.
  Room for Disagreement
  Bezos, wrote in defense of his decision:
  “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. 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.”
  The timing, harder to explain, reflected “inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy,” he wrote.