The Washington Post has lost over a quarter of a million subscribers in the fallout over its decision to end its long-running practice of endorsing presidential candidates.

The subscriber loss, which was reported by the Post on Tuesday night, is nearly 10 percent of the paper’s paying digital subscribers. As of last year, the Post had more than 2.5 million subscribers, placing it third in circulation behind the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 

Such a drop is likely to put further pressure on the Post, which is already grappling with major downswings in digital traffic. Monthly website visits in February 2024 came out to 55 million — an estimated 60 percent decline from the 140 million visits recorded in April 2020. 

However, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, who oversees news coverage, reportedly urged the staff to wait for the dust to settle. “There’s a view that the numbers are going to be bumpy and rough for a couple weeks, and we’ll see how they settle down,” Mr. Murray said during a news staff meeting on Tuesday. “I think everybody’s trying to just take a few weeks to see where the numbers all come out.”

The surge in cancellations began just hours after the publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper was doing away with its tradition of presidential endorsements, beginning this election cycle. 

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Mr. Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published by the Post on Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

The Post first began to offer endorsements in 1976 when the paper reversed its policy of abstention to back Jimmy Carter in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The decision, Mr. Lewis cited in his article, was made “for understandable reasons at the time,” though he wrote that “we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.” 

Mr. Lewis insisted that the policy change should not be taken as “tacit endorsement of one candidate” nor “a condemnation of another” but that the decision reflects “the values The Post has always stood for.” 

Objections to the new policy reverberated into the newsroom, with two Post journalists choosing to resign from their positions on the editorial board. A third journalist — of the 10-member board — later stepped down as well. 

Several prominent staffers spoke out against the decision, framing it as an effort by the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, to appease President Trump ahead of a potential second term. Over 20 opinion columnists called the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake” in a dissenting opinion article published in the Post on Friday.

A former columnist, Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday, condemned the paper for “bending the knee to Donald Trump” over fear “of what he will do.” A former executive editor, Martin Baron, who retired from the Post in 2021, called the policy change “craven” and “cowardly.” 

It was later reported that an endorsement of Ms. Harris had been drafted by the editorial board before Mr. Bezos decided to cancel it altogether. 

Amid the fallout, Mr. Bezos defended his non-endorsement ruling in an op-ed published in the Post on Monday evening, denying claims that his decision was driven by a desire to be in Trump’s good standings.

“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally,” Mr. Bezos wrote. 

He also denied that there was any connection between the new policy and a recent meeting between the chief executive of one of his companies, Blue Origin, and Trump, which he wrote provided “ammunition” for the appearance of conflict. 

The billionaire businessman, rather, cited the public’s dwindling trust in the press — which, as of this year, has dropped to below Congress — as the central motivator behind the non-endorsement rule. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” he wrote. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.” 

Mr. Bezos acknowledged, however, that the 11th hour timing of the decision was regrettable, writing that he wished “we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.” 

The Washington Post is not the only paper to reconsider its endorsement policy this election cycle. USA Today announced on Tuesday that it, along with the 200 local papers that it manages, would do away with offering endorsements. 

Before that, Los Angeles Times’s endorsement for Ms. Harris was quashed by its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong. His daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, who does not have a formal role at the paper, claimed that the non-endorsement was driven by Ms. Harris’s support for Israel.

Though Mr. Soon-Shiong later clarified that his daughter “does not have any role” at the Times nor does she have a hand in “any decision or discussion with the editorial board.” 

Los Angeles Times has since seen numerous resignations, including its former Editorial editor, Mariel Garza. The Times’s union leadership released a statement expressing that they were “deeply concerned” by Mr. Soon-Shiong’s decision.