Washington Post’s Express Shuts Down With Middle Finger to Smartphone Obsessed Commuters

Caleb EcarmaSep 12th, 2019, 10:16 am
 

The final edition of the Washington Post‘s local Express paper was issued on Thursday, as the news outlet opted to shut down their weekday commuter vertical due to the “growth of WiFi in Washington’s Metro system” that allows readers to consume morning news on their smartphones.

Express, which was in circulation for 16 years, was a free paper that focused on Washington, D.C.-area news and was mostly distributed in or around the city’s Metro system. The Post laid off 20 journalists after the shutter; it is unclear what will happen to the 75 employees whose job it was to distribute the paper throughout the city. While Express made no money from subscriptions, it did create revenue from print advertising.

The cover of Express‘ closing issue included a not-so-subtle middle finger to the digital content that contributed to the paper’s demise.

“More and more readers are consuming The Post’s content digitally, and The Post will continue to serve those who commute via Metro with digital products, including its mobile site, apps, newsletters, and podcasts,” the Post‘s PR team said in a statement announcing the shutter on Wednesday. “With the growth of WiFi in Washington’s Metro system, The Post can now serve those readers in ways that couldn’t have been imagined when it launched 16 years ago. More and more readers are consuming The Post’s content digitally.”

“It’s been a rough half a year for us … I don’t know that our performance recently necessarily reflected what it would be going forward,” Dan Caccavaro, Express‘ final executive editor, told the DCist, before adding that the decision was likely “made pretty recently.”

“On the editorial side, we’ve been really fired up lately and doing some of our best work,” he added. “We’ve done more original work than we’ve ever done.”

The Post‘s decision to close the paper has come under scrutiny due to Express employees allegedly being underpaid, while also being excluded from the paper’s union.

“These employees, many of them young women, performed the same jobs as other staff in our newsroom for substantially lesser pay,” the Washington Post Newspaper Guild said in a statement condemning the closure. “They were excluded from a union contract that would have protected them only by legal and bureaucratic fictions that labeled them a different entity within our company, though Post Express and The Washington Post are both owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world.”

Ex-employees at the outlet have taken to Twitter to comment on the Post‘s surprise decision.

“Today is my last day at a job I started less than four months ago,” tweeted Mark Lieberman, who was an editor at Express. “It’s not great.”

“We are fired!” wrote Sadie Dingfelder on Twitter, another former Express employee. “Or let go or whatever.”

The Express sports editor Sarah Kelly explained that she “moved to DC specifically for this job and signed a 12-month lease literally two weeks ago so I guess I need some DC-based work. This is my fifth time getting laid off/having my position eliminated in the eight years I’ve been working full-time but [to be fair] only three of those were in the news industry.”

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Caleb Ecarma

Caleb Ecarma was a reporter at Mediaite. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter here: @calebecarma