Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Should I unsubscribe from the Washington Post?

I started out in newspapers. My first job was an internship with the Sarasota Journal (a now-defunct afternoon paper that was the sister publication of the morning Herald-Tribune). I was a cliche cub reporter in a newsroom full of battered metal desks with manual typewriters, where big beige multi-line phones rang continually through the day, where the copy editors sat at a semi-circular desk marking up copies with fat black pencils, literally cutting (with scissors) and pasting (with sticky rubber cement) stories into something worthy of publication. Where rolled-up copy was swooshed through a pneumatic tube to the typesetters downstairs who used hot lead linotype machines, clack, clack, clackity clack to mock up flat plates that would roll through the presses starting promptly at noon for subscribers, with a second, updated edition due at 2 p.m. for the metal paper boxes posted all around town.

It was the late 1970s. Nixon had been undone by a couple of gritty reporters from the Washington Post. All of us, all the reporters I worked with, all my fellow students in Journalism school, all my agitated young colleagues at The Independent Florida Alligator — we all wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. We all wanted to work at the Washington Post. We all wanted to change the world with our words.

Oh, the Post. How I have loved you over the years. Moving to Maryland in summer of 1983, the first thing we did was subscribe. Day after day, year after year, thump, that load of newsprint landed on our front stoop. Through the presidencies of Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes, through the glory days of the Washington Football Team (and Tony Kornheiser’s “bandwagon” of fans), through Columbine and 9/11 and the Washington snipers, the Post helped me make sense of my life. Even I never ended up working in newspapers, in my heart, I always was a newspaper person. In my heart, the Post was still my ideal.

I even got the chance to work in a Post-adjacent newsroom. In the birthing days of the internet, I was a part-time copy editor for the launch team of the paper’s website, washingtonpost.com. They parked us out in a suite of offices in Arlington, Virginia, well across the river from the real newsroom in town, the one replicated in All the President’s Men, at 15th and L Sts. NW (The one that got torn down in 2016 so Fannie Mae could have a shiny new headquarters, as the Post staff shrunk and they all moved over to rented space on K Street). Our job was to copy and paste real stories into html, so they could be found on the World Wide Web by anyone in the world. But the publisher and editors of the print paper didn’t take us seriously. Not yet. Print newspapers were where it was at, baby. Who could take this internet stuff seriously?

Fast forward to today. The Graham family, long-time owners of the Post, sold it to billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013. The print publication, like most print newspapers, is now a ghost of its former self. All the action is at washingtonpost.com, the publication’s online presence, with a paid subscription base of about 2.5 million subscribers, minus the more than 200,000 who dropped their subscriptions after Jeff Bezos ordered the paper not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 (the editorial staff had planned to endorse Kamala Harris). A number of notable staff left in the ensuing chaos.

A number of my friends ended their subscriptions over it. I did not. I even passionately tried to convince one friend not to cancel her subscription, texting her that: “not subscribing to the Post won’t hurt Bezos even a tiny bit. It’s a toy that he bought to save it from the already uncertain future it was facing. It would be in really bad shape now if he hadn’t. But the Post losing 200,000 subscribers will hurt the kind of journalism we still need. The nation’s capital will lose its paper. And a WaPo endorsement isn’t changing anyone’s mind at this point.”

Then Friday, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit. Her editor refused to publish her latest cartoon of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, bowing down before Trump. You can read more at her Substack. Here’s the too-risky cartoon, in draft form:

So now I’m questioning all the reasoning I offered my friend. Now, I’m thinking of cancelling my own subscription. Partly in protest, but partly because I can’t keep watching this train wreck. Of all the publications we need to watchdog our democracy, this one, rooted in our nation’s capital, is maybe the most crucial. But once it starts cavilling and vacillating, caving to the whims of its billionaire owner who came up with the paper’s tagline, “Democracy dies in darkness,” back when he was a never-Trumper but who now … well, the cartoon, the cartoon …

I crave my daily dose of Carolyn Hax, but I suppose I could hunt her syndicated self down in some other publication. There are other sources for the kind of news I think our nation needs right now, but there’s not anything that will still tell me what Washington-area restaurants to try when I visit family and friends there, or what is up with the long-delayed Silver Line, or how RFK Stadium may yet be the home of the Commanders.

I don’t know. I’m already grieving the loss of so many newspapers, the zombie-like presence of those few that are left (looking at you, Lansing State Journal).

But I’m thinking of abandoning ship, along with a quarter-million or more of my Post-reading peers.

It’s sad. I’m sad.

In my sleep, sometimes, I still smell the lingering odor of hot lead, still feel the thumping of the presses rolling, deep in the bowels of the building.