Despite an exodus of subscribers, The Washington Post gains in crucial metric that may prove beneficial

As The Washington Post suffers from over 250,000 people cancelling their subscriptions, not all signs are doom and gloom — one particular element in the paper’s favor will likely surprise many.

The Washington Post came under fire recently when they announced that they will not endorse a presidential candidate. This despite endorsing someone in every presidential election dating back to 1966, and only endorsing the Democratic nominee since 1992.

The seemingly popular response was for many subscribers — especially celebrities such as Stephen King and Mark Hamill — to announce that they are unsubscribing to the paper.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013. Despite its global readership, WaPo can be said to be something of a struggling paper. Last year it lost over $100 million resulting in 240 jobs being cut.

With such a divided political landscape, many people have expressed the frustration of news outlets taking sides. In the era of social media, it appears that disinformation is the norm and most of it is born out of sectarian favoritism.

It was on Friday Oct 25 when The Washington Post announced that it will not endorse a candidate. As of Tuesday Oct 29, WaPo had lost over 250,00 subscribers. However, this past weekend also saw an unusual 12% spike in downloads of the WaPo app in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, which tracks such data.

Initially reported by The Wrap, the percentage growth is based off of the previous weekend and suggests that while WaPo is losing subscribers, others are suddenly interested in the outlet for the same reason.

Furthermore, the app downloads have increased WaPo‘s app ranking amongst news apps in the U.S. On Thursday, the app was ranked 31st in the news category based on total number of downloads. As of Tuesday, it has jumped 11 spots to number 19.

Losing 250,000 subscribers is obviously damaging, at least in the short-term. WaPo has over 2.5 million subscribers, so this downturn accounts for losing 10% of them. Such a percentage is a lot, but it perhaps says something more when 90% of subscribers are not cancelling. They seem to be staying on board as Bezos sticks by his decision, which may have attracted new subscribers.

In an op-ed published on Monday in The Washington Post, Bezos explained his decision and even titled the piece, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”

Bezos offers, “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.”

Despite the pushback, it makes one wonder if it really is controversial that a newspaper does not actually endorse a presidential candidate. Because The Washington Post has done so for decades, it seems controversial not to do so now, especially considering they could have made this decision a year ago, when no election was on the immediate horizon. However, assuming The Post stays true to Bezos’ description above, decades from now people may be used to them not endorsing a candidate, and it may prove controversial if they do, because it will go against his declaration of maintaining a nominally unbiased approach to politics.

Just like anything, editorial change just takes getting used to. A change was apparently needed at WaPo, at least according to its billionaire owner. Time will tell if this particular change in direction is the right one.