Bezos celebrated in Europe with Katy Perry as Post crisis began

Washington Post executives sought initially to keep its latest internal drama at arms length from its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. After a week of speculation about the endorsement kicked off by Semafor and Status News, on Friday, publisher Will Lewis — who had reportedly opposed the decision to end political endorsements — published an essay explaining the decision in his own name, which appeared just before noon in Washington. Lewis and the paper released a series of statements saying it was the Post’s decision alone to revise its presidential endorsement policy going forward.

But over the weekend, reporting in the Times revealed that Bezos was obviously involved. The tech billionaire had made the decision after seeing the Post’s planned Harris endorsement. Leadership at the Post also began to panic as the paper’s business began to enter a tailspin: The non-endorsement decision had also ballooned into a full-blown crisis that had cost the paper millions in revenue as hundreds of thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions overnight.

On Monday, the owner published his own essay defending the decision, and made passing reference to the decision’s lurching, last-minute quality: “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy,” he wrote.

Bezos’ decision not to endorse a candidate and its subsequent reader revolt raise a series of important questions about the Post’s future and his own involvement in it.

After several years of subscriber decline, the paper had finally started to regrow its paying readership following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and heightened interest in the Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign against Donald Trump. The unexpected, massive dropoff in subscriptions will almost certainly lead to tough financial decisions for a paper that has already been depleted by several rounds of cuts and talent drain over the last several years. It also almost certainly delays the plans the paper had to make acquisitions in the media space. Will the paper’s subscriber shortfall prompt Lewis to tap up Bezos for help covering the paper’s losses?

It also further clouds Lewis’ plans for a “Third Newsroom” that would sit alongside its editorial and opinion sections. How can the Post launch another newsroom when much of its opinion section has quit, stepped back, or seems headed for the exits?