Here are all 503 responses we got to our survey on why people cancel their news subscriptions. You can read our story about it here.

Ad Age

• “My price went from $99 to $169. My ceiling was $100. Before that Bloomberg, but with Bloomberg, I let my subscription run out as I’m not going to pay $400+ and then I get an offer for $200 a few weeks later and I resubscribe. I’ve done this at least twice so far.”

The Age (Australia)

• “Cuts to journalist numbers and consequent drop in quality and breadth of reporting.”

Albuquerque Journal

• “News coverage generally shallow and writing lackluster and insipid; parent company pays significantly below industry standards with predictable results; editorials are knee-jerk conservative — which would be fine were they not so poorly reasoned — and if the editorial department also made more of an effort to present varying community viewpoints.”

Apple News+

• “It was just not worth it for me.”
• “Budgetary reasons, not enough value.”
• “I could find news from sources I consider reputable on my own. Also Google Alerts is a cheaper way to be notified of the kind of news I want.”
• “Budgetary reasons, not enough value.”
• “At the time, it didn’t save my place in articles, so longer features had to be read in one sitting, which wasn’t always possible.”
• “Too much clickbait, pop culture fluff.”
• “Sub was through Apple. But I get a lot of email newsletters. And there was no way to link the newsletter version with the newsroom app in Apple. To make matters worse, titles were not the same in the [newsletter] as on the app in apple. It made finding the story doubly difficult. So I was bumping up against the ‘free’ web ceiling for articles that came from the [newsletter] and yet unable to find the story in the app. So I just gave up. I almost never perused the newsroom apps, so I let the subscriptions go.”

Arizona Daily Star

• “Delivery was spotty and the paper did not cover local NHL team very well.”

The Arizona Republic

• “Price keeps escalating, the content was sloppy, slim, and not on target about top issues of the community or state.”
• “My wife wanted to go from twice a week to full seven days. Can’t do it by email with Republic. Told we have to call. Number to call seems to be regional phone center, constantly busy. Called Republic directly but were told to try to call earlier in the morning and maybe the call center wouldn’t be so busy. Always busy. Tried sending a letter to Republic, no answer. Tried sending letter to billing center, no answer. Finally went to bank and had auto withdrawal for monthly subscription canceled. Only response from Republic was that payment request was denied.”

Architectural Digest

• “Showcasing celebrity wealth and purchasing power is obscene during a time of widening inequity for middle-class first-time homebuyers (me).”

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

• “The owner actively seeks to destroy the public school system in Arkansas by supporting charter school takeovers and candidates who hate public schools and unions. Then he donated millions to an out-of-state university’s journalism department while at the same time choosing not to pay his own reporters a living wage or match their retirement plans.”
• “I canceled it many years ago at a point in time when money was tight and there were more necessary expenses.”
• “Price went up. Way too high. And it was clear the owner endorsed Trump.”

The Athletic

• “Didn’t read it enough to justify the annual subscription cost. I liked it when I read it, but I didn’t read it enough to make it worthwhile.”
• “My one year was up, and I didn’t feel like I used it enough to justify the expense.”
• “I couldn’t afford to pay for yet another news service. As much as I respect the reporters and their work I just can’t afford subscriptions to more than a handful of news sites.”
• “Inconsistent, not essential.”
• “I wasn’t reading enough of it. I got a $1 trial and have always been curious about sports, so I thought The Athletic’s journalism might be a good entry point. But not enough of their articles appealed to me. They were too detailed, probably requiring a more involved kind of reader.”
• “They don’t publish as much soccer information as I would like. They are brilliant in other sports, but soccer is undercovered.”

The Atlantic

• “They keep publishing transphobic stories and have transphobic leadership. We tried to reach them through sign on letters and they just doubled down on the hatred. Transphobia is deadly. There is no excuse. No more ‘well I’m just asking questions.’ Jesse Singal and co have trans blood on their hands.”
• “Printed some ill-thought-out anti-mask baloney.”
• “No balance. I subscribed because I thought it would offer thoughtful discourse on issues before us. Articles all seemed to be left-leaning.”
• “Unattractive content. Unattractive email design.”
• “Wasn’t reading it often enough; partly would forget I had it, partly too much competition for my eyeballs on the phone.”
• “Just didn’t find myself reading it enough.”
• “Let go of too many journalists; took on too many terrible contributions from non-staff.”
• “I was going through my budget for recurring charges I can cut — something I do about twice a year — and realized that I just wasn’t using them. The print issues were stacking up and I wasn’t hitting the paywalls online. I kept my New Yorker, New York/The Cut, The City, Bklynr, and City Limits subscriptions, plus a bunch of running-related newsletters and magazines.”
• “I found I wasn’t reading it or going to the site. I had previously canceled the print magazine last year but had kept the digital subscription.”

Austin American-Statesman

• “I went to find local city election results in May and the desktop site UX was so horrible that the elections tab sent me to news from November. It was impossible to navigate back to local content. But when I landed there through searching, the data was visualized without any context in a plain and basic chart I could have coded in the 9th grade. I also haven’t gotten any follow up correspondence since subscribing more than a month ago. This unfortunately doesn’t demonstrate value.”

Baltimore Sun

• “It was the last of my existing subscriptions and the hardest. I’m a local reporter myself and money is tight. It was a financial necessity. I couldn’t afford to subscribe to the local publication I write for were I not an employee.”
• “Delivery issues. I called to complain so many times and they never fixed it.”
• “Not using.”

The Bulletin (Bend, Ore.)

• “I set up this subscription as a gift for my dad. He’s pretty tech savvy, so I don’t think this was a user issue. Even though the subscription was set to autopay every month (they didn’t have an option where you could pay for a year upfront), he would get a message on the site reminding him to renew his subscription every day because there were X days left in the month. My dad was so annoyed with the messages! I really wanted to support my hometown paper, but they made the experience so bad that my dad decided it was better to cancel than to deal with the messages.”

The Billings Gazette

• “Never-ending price increases as quality was decreasing.”

The Birmingham News

• “I took the Sunday paper in large part to support local journalism (I’m a former reporter and current journalism educator). I canceled it because the delivery was missed so often. I’d often go several weeks at a time without receiving the paper; even my missed delivery calls often didn’t result in a delivered paper.”

Bloomberg

• “The introductory discount ended.”
• “More than I can read in a day.”
• “Trial ended and now too expensive.”
• “I thought it was very high quality but most of what I learned I also got from other sources. Maybe more importantly, I seem to get most of the meaningful content of a story from the headlines and the sub-head sentence. The details in the story often seem to be elaboration or history that I already know.”

Bloomberg Businessweek

• “Too expensive combined with not enough time to read, among increasing competition for leisure time as economy reopens and summer approaches.”
• “Cost too darn much money for fixed income.”

Bon Appétit

• “First, there were all the revelations about racism at the magazine. Then, a lot of people left, understandably. But the new content of the magazine is simply not that good anymore. It is all over the place. There is too much about wellness and I feel like the efforts the editors are making seem over the top, like they are trying so hard and have yet to figure out a new vision for the team and the magazine. Some of the people that stayed, such as Brad Leone, were part of the problem. Furthermore, Condé Nast remains highly problematic and part of me really does not want to support this publication.”
• “I loved their YouTube videos and cooked recipes from their website for years so in summer 2019, I decided I should subscribe because, as a journalist, I know that’s a way to show support. But when shit hit the fan about how unequally they were treating their staff of color (especially on the video side) last summer, I really cooled on them. And then a lot of my favorite personas/cooks left the magazine, which didn’t help my enthusiasm for the brand. I know they brought in a Black EIC and it seems like they’re trying a lot harder to reckon with the newsroom’s racist past (and probably present tbh) but right now a lot of the magazine also feels unapproachable — ingredients that are harder to come by, etc. I’m sure finding the balance of ‘challenging our readers to try new things’ and ‘giving them good recipes that they’ll find familiar’ is really hard for a food mag — plus any sort of shifting brand identity is hard from an editorial perspective. But in the end, I wasn’t reading the physical copy I got in the mail anymore and I wanted to spend that $40 (or whatever) on the websites I read every day, like the Guardian and Defector, etc.”

The Boston Globe

• “Their position was too liberal and one-sided.”
• “I learned that the monthly rate for online news was nearly $30 per month. This is for a paper owned by a billionaire. I didn’t want the six-month deal, because after that it reverts to that crazy price. Beyond that, the news is generic. I am a bisexual older single mom to a biracial daughter. I have never seen a story about bisexuals in the paper. So, why should I pay so much? Also, the online community at the Globe (comments) is neanderthal.”
• “I cancelled it because it felt too overwhelming to keep up with so many news subscriptions during lockdown. Also, I realized that I’d been reading only a few sections of the Globe (its investigative pieces and Ideas vertical) so I decided I’ll stop my subscription. It was also too expensive to pay for so many subscriptions. If they had an alternative option where I could pay for a certain number of pieces a month or a way to follow certain sections of the site, I might have kept my subscription.”
• “Very expensive — long term loyal customers were being gouged.”
• “They hiked up the price from ~$7/month to ~$28. BUT … they called back a couple days later and offered a $5/month deal and I resubscribed. Does that count? (BG model is very weird. It’s the 2nd time they did this, went from low to very high.)”
• “Too expensive.”
• “It auto renewed which didn’t bother me that much, but then I realized I had to MAKE A PHONE CALL to cancel a digital subscription. Then they kept offering promotions to try to get me to stay, which I found desperate and weird. The last offer was actually quite good, but at point I cancelled on principle. Either offer promo rates or don’t. Absurd. Also The Boston Globe is a nativist press institution.”
• “They never delivered the actual newspaper despite maaaaaaany calls and they’re union-busting jerks.”
• “I was a U.S. mail subscriber and since Christmas, it takes six weeks for a paper to cross the country … and I was willing to pay $1600 per year!”
• “Mostly rehash of NY Times.”

Cairns Post (Australia)

• “It changed from a broadsheet with actual news into a Murdoch (News Corp) tabloid that was a blatant campaign instrument against science and a magnifier of extreme views that enhanced outrage (presumably as aspect of their business model).”

Canadaland

• “Pay disparity between their male and female workers.”

The Capital/Capital Gazette

• “After they laid off numerous journalists, I was no longer interested in supporting their newsroom and its recovery from tragedy.”
• “My subscription to Baltimore Sun went way up, and I’m not working because of the pandemic. I had to cancel Gazette, Maryland Daily Record, Washington Post and New York Times.”

Charleston Gazette-Mail

• “Non-transparency. A substantial rate increase just appeared on our credit card statement. No advance notification there would be an increase, and no explanation, apology or clarification. This occurred around March, 2020 (or thereabouts).”
• “It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know from the local TV in the area. It felt like a once great newsroom that had been gutted.”

Chicago Sun-Times

• “Not enough content to make it worth the expense. Chicago is a very big city and the number of locally generated stories each day is remarkably small. Block Club Chicago has a significantly smaller staff than the CST, yet it manages to crank out as many, if not more, new stories each day. Plus, those stories [at] BCC are much more interesting than what you’ll find in the pages of the CST.”

Chicago Tribune

• “They continue to promote blatantly racist and seditionist content by columnist John Kass, with blatantly racist and seditionist tweets echoing his blatantly racist and seditionist content.”
• “A disgusting opinion piece following the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old boy.”
• “I haven’t lived in Chicago for 5 years! And because I was tired of accepting their $1 a year retention offer every year, only to have to call them again the year later when the subscription would renew at the regular price (which I’d miraculously spot on my credit card statement).”
• “Oppressive cancelation policy that requires calling customer support to cancel, plus a teaser rates that jump to $15.96 per four weeks, a price not justified by the product.”
• “Even as a paying digital/Sunday paper subscriber, the ads hosted on the site were overwhelming. I understand bombarding a non-subscriber with ads, but people who pay should be able to navigate through the site without a popup every few seconds.”
• “Multiple reasons. First its digital offerings offer a very poor reader experience between pop ups and ads moving the text around while reading a story. Second, Alden’s purchase of Michael Ferro’s shares. I don’t want to support Alden in any way. Third, the general reduction in the quantity of content has greatly reduced the amount of time I spend using the Chicago Tribune subscription, so it seemed like a waste of money.”
• “Didn’t want to give my money to Alden. Was finding I never opened the paper, and was getting most of my news from Block Club Chicago (which I give $ to).”
• “Get all my news from multiple sources online.”
• “I moved away from Chicago so I didn’t need the Tribune’s city-specific news. But I also was never a fan of their national reporting — there are much better papers. Also, they make it a pain to cancel a subscription — I had to call them to cancel! Their digital platform is also pretty mediocre.”
• “I subscribe to digital versions of A LOT of newspapers and when a four-month promo rate recently ended on the Chicago Tribune (which I used to read regularly a long time ago and wanted to see how its newsroom was holding up after so many disappointing turns of events for reporters at that entity), I decided that the new rate of $3.99 per week billed every four weeks was more than I could fit into the ongoing budget. I called up to cancel but the rep offered me a different promo, $6.50 for six months. So for the nonce, I remain a (somewhat skeptical) subscriber to the Chicago Tribune after all.”

Enterprise-Record (Chico, Calif.)

• “Delivery got later and later every day, until the paper was coming at about 9 a.m. Then they steeply raised the print subscription rate and we said ‘enough.’ We still subscribe to the daily e-edition and get the print edition three times each week. That said, I keep getting logged out of the newspaper website, which is beyond infuriating”

The Christian Science Monitor

• “Was all one-sided. Liberal.”

The Columbus Dispatch

• “I received the paper by mail and was getting three or four editions together a month late thanks to the U.S. Post Office.”

The Correspondent (no longer publishing)

• “Because they lied. They made it sound like they would be doing theme/beat-based globs journalism, but it was just the founders’ ego to have a crown jewel in English. I think the Dutch version is good — they do some timely, much-needed journalism. But the English website was all over the place. Like, there was no global angle to the stories. It was just very Euro-centric. Also they embellished their original motivations and goals, which they could never reach. And they lied about NY office, which I wasn’t a fan of anyways but still.”

The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.)

• “Too liberal, too many progressive slants vs. being pragmatic.”
• “Quality decline under Gannett ownership. No longer useful.”

Crain’s Chicago Business

• “Cost too much for how little I was using it and I wanted to avoid getting to the end of the trial period where cancelling would undoubtedly become much harder.”
• “It was too niche of a publication for someone who isn’t in the business field and I already have too many news subscriptions. I got a trial subscription so that I could read one specific article, but then I felt that the rest of the content was not really geared toward the average reader.”

Crosscut (Seattle, Wash.)

• “They fully adopted ‘solutions journalism’ and all their solutions were democrat/left/socialist/PC. They ceased being a trusted feature writer because they could no longer report honestly. Honesty in journalism means you tell all — not just the agendas you support. Honesty means you do not omit facts simply because they dilute your chosen agenda. This organization had become 100% agenda-driven. So I consider it to be a PAC and not a journalistic organization. It pained me greatly to severe with them, because I was formerly a very supportive member, both in promoting them and in financially supporting them. I believe they were/are a nonprofit.”

Daily News (New York)

• “They increased the rate without notice.”

The Daily Record (Wooster, Ohio)

• “They outsourced my job after 43 years and said I was no longer needed.”

The Denver Post

• “I refuse to support the vulture capitalist owner who sucks the profits out and screws the employees (and the city).”
• “I had subscribed to the Post for many years. I moved to another apartment and informed the Post of my new address. For whatever reasons, the carrier serving my neighborhood declined to deliver more than half the issues I subscribed to. Eventually I contacted the VP of Circulation, who visited me at my apartment and promised I would forthwith receive his paper regularly. Did not happen and I canceled.”
• “Was a loyal subscriber for more than 40 years. Quality had deteriorated to the point it wasn’t even worth the $10/month digital subscription. Alden has killed the Post.”

Des Moines Register

• “Too expensive.”
• “I felt I needed to read all of the articles that I was notified about, and it became too much to keep up with. I also felt my other local subscriptions or free subscriptions tended to give me similar news.”

Desert Sun

• “They failed to deliver the Sunday newspaper to me multiple times a month.”

Detroit Free Press

• “The overall website experience is terrible, I had problems logging in, they added up to $20 per month, and I got most of their news off social.”

Digiday+

• “No longer relevant.”

East Bay Times(formerly Contra Costa Times)

• “As an Oakland resident, I’m getting more value from the new (nonprofit) Oaklandside online paper as a local paper (that is covering Oakland better!), and already subscribe to LA Times, and New York Times for state and national coverage.”
• “The paper had become thinner. Too thin.
  Too many AP stories, too few local stories.
  Ads were overwhelmingly aimed at a geriatric audience.
  They frequently missed delivery.
  They were lackadaisical about recovery service for undelivered papers.
  They were aggressive about charging my credit card in advance, and then not delivering the paper.
  They were passive/aggressive with my complaint calls and recalcitrant about canceling my account. I felt I had to wrest my credit card permission away from them. A creepy company to trade with.
  Their online subscription option? Fuggettaboutit.”

The Economist

• “Because they hired James Bennett.”
• “Too expensive and many stories seemed old. Maybe a weekly can’t keep up. Analysis good but …”
• “Too expensive and I didn’t have the time or energy to read enough articles to make it seem worth the $.”
• “Too expensive.”
• “Outdated and traditional format. Too general analysis. Little real added value in content. Old-fashioned website.”
• “A lot of money to not read very much of, endless spam marketing emails that I couldn’t turn off. A good example of a pub in which I like a few writers and want to read what they write all the time, but not enough to subscribe to a big weekly.”
• “Lost time needed to read it consistently.”
• “Wasn’t actively reading it.”
• “I had this nostalgia for reading it in print — the feel of the paper, carrying it around, etc. But when I got it, issue after issue piled up and it turned out I didn’t have the attention span for it anymore. Even though I still like their writing, it wasn’t quite unique enough to compete with the other things I’m also paying for online (and accessing free on podcasts).”
• “I forgot to read it every Friday so it was not that important to me.”
• “Too wordy. I didn’t like how articles would start and then stop and then start again. Hard to follow and I’d found once I’d read the first section, I couldn’t be bothered to later return to other parts about same topic.”

Edmonton Journal

• “I just got fed up with its anti-progressive bullshit. The last straw was a defamatory cartoon on the editorial page.”

Entertainment Weekly

• “When EW was a weekly, I didn’t read every issue cover to cover, but over time I felt I was getting enough value to continue subscribing. Once it became a monthly, my already attenuated interest fell off even more. I found I wasn’t opening issue after issue. And as a writer whose inner copy editor speaks loudly, I confess to a low-level irritation with the contradiction between the publication’s name and its publishing frequency.”

The Epoch Times

• “Post election reporting became overtly unobjectively biased and prejudicial.”

Financial Times

• “I didn’t read enough articles to make the cost worth it.”
• “I signed up to a $1 promo to be able to read an article.”
• “I used to make an effort and pay their very high individual subscription price (€33/month), so I was glad when I got a special offer from them at €25/month). But after a few months, it seemed to me the quality of the paper had declined, I wasn’t really getting much from them that I wasn’t getting from other papers. That’s when I decided to cancel. It’s still a good paper, only widely overpriced.”

Florida Today

• “Sick of the Socialist tone of the Editorial Board and the news industry in general. The media and especially the newspapers was what we all waited for everyday to get honest news. That all fell by the wayside as the Socialist trained journalists graduated from the Socialist-Liberal schools. Their goal to destroy our great Constitution and Freedoms in America are beginning to bite them in the ass. They need to realize that they are the ones who are putting themselves out of business.”

Foreign Affairs

• “Too many subscriptions already and I wasn’t reading it.”

Foreign Policy

• “Limited funds.”
• “Although I am an avid reader, I am retired and on a fixed income, and $199 per year for another publication (I subscribed at one point to 27, as a hobby, not for work) is much too expensive for me to handle. Outrageously expensive. Everyone and their brother is draining the pennies out of our pockets. Death by a thousand cuts. I called them and told them they needed to consider a separate subscription for students and seniors, instead of focusing on foreign policy and diplomatic professionals.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

• “Wholly one-sided opinions page. Almost no progressive contributors, but the same 3 or 4 conservatives every day. I like reading conflicting opinions, but few were provided. Found the opinion editor’s Twitter feed and realized that even though I’d given feedback in the past, it wouldn’t matter — heavily pro-Trum[p] tweets and likes. Also they have gutted local stories and coverage. Most of what they publish is cobbled together from other sources that I could read elsewhere. Big old aggregation machine pushing a one side agenda.”
• “Content kept shrinking, even faster than the price increased. It was obvious that money was diverted to corporate. What was a passably good paper (the Dallas paper was better, but I canceled because of the way they handled their price doubling as a fait accompli) became little better than a tabloid rag, and the news was just as easily available online.”

Fortune

• “I wasn’t reading the issues as thoroughly (after I stopped writing about business) and the stories weren’t provocative enough. I didn’t lose interest in business stories but their way of reporting (often, analytical but too glowing) didn’t resonate anymore.”

Foster’s Daily Democrat

• “There was no reason to read it. The local news death spiral was obvious. Declining circulation and ad lineage led to layoffs and/or retirements equaling less and less news. My test for any publication is did I learn anything reading it? Did I discover new happenings or gain insight on people, places, events, issues I was interested in? I hadn’t subscribed to the local paper for years until they ran a promotion offering a gift card to the local supermarket that equaled a month of daily home delivery. After a month, I canceled. There was no there there. Online alternatives for local news, including the paper’s partially paywalled Seacoastonline.com, tell us what we need to know. They aren’t very good, but the price — free! — is right.”

The Globe and Mail

• “Way too conservative a paper and bashing Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government all the time. It just got super annoying.”
• “The print edition no longer fit into my routine.”
• “Ultimately there wasn’t enough content that I actually wanted to read. Their interests aren’t mine, or their pro-business editorial slant. Beyond that the writing is stunningly dull.”
• “I also pay for the Winnipeg Free Press. For me personally, I enjoy reading the WFP more as I live in Winnipeg, and the WFP extensively covers local news events and even does investigative journalism. The Globe and Mail focuses too much on national issues (which I also read about in the WFP), and on Ottawa/Toronto, cities which I don’t live in.”
• “I’m so tired of seeing content in their newsletters or on social media that I can’t access because their subscription page pops up. I have to go out of where I am and go into the app or online to find the story and sometimes I can’t. NYT gives me excellent content in my inbox every morning. I believe they give me more chances to read stories before I’m blocked and have to go looking for them … I want to support local news but as a user/reader, I’m annoyed by their miserly ways, by their slow and/or lack of product development. Their daily podcast is embarrassing. It’s not difficult to make a good podcast, people!”

Green Bay Press-Gazette

• “A fluctuating monthly price always about $6 more a month than the business office claimed I should be paying. Ultimately I dropped it because of all the newsroom cuts Gannett made. They cut local coverage until the majority of the came from primarily from the Milwaukee market 200 miles away.”
• “Actually, I didn’t intend to cancel. But when I canceled my Milwaukee Journal Sentinel subscription, the dreadful Gannett customer service canceled my Green Bay subscription as well, and I just said screw it.”

The Guardian

• “The UK portion of the publication was touting anti-trans essays and articles. US and Aussie reporters, from my understanding, were begging them not to, but the UK folks were somehow firmly entrenched in [Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist]dom. I don’t give money to anti-trans pieces of shit, and I told them so (more nicely) when I canceled. Perhaps they’re starting to come around; I need more info and a statement of apology to trans adults and youth in the UK, and then I’ll think about giving them my £6.99 a month again. (I’m a USian. And a cis woman, but not a terf supporter.)”
• “There was a letter from the editorial team that went out which many interpreted as quite transphobic. They cited a need to maintain politically impartial on a contentious issue, but I believed that interpreting the rights and voices of trans people as an issue that was ‘up for debate’ highly problematic. I think it’s really important to agree with the values of the news you read, especially if you are paying for it.”
• “Unsubscribed but replaced it by a smaller donation. The amount for subscription was too high compared to my consumption, and only the app gets ad-free for digital subscribers. Not the website.”
• “Because I’d just done another subscription to an Italian magazine and the total amount was going to be too high (but I was really sorry to cancel The Guardian).”
• “Honestly, I’ve taken a hit from Covid. I understand the need for paywalls. Conspiracy-based news from sources like Fox/Breitbart/Qanon/Newsmax/Sinclair are all free while solid reporting like NY Times/Guardian/Mother Jones are behind paywalls. I’m deeply deeply fearful for democracy and freedom of the press.”
• “I was always happy to support the Guardian because I thought their reporting was excellent and I enjoyed their long read and feature coverage. I wanted to do everything I could to make sure there was a decent alternative to a Murdoch owned press out there. Yes, occasionally the opinion and lifestyle pages read like a parody of themselves, but overall I thought it was top notch journalism.However, their editorial stance on the transgender community is horrifying. It’s the gay moral panic of the eighties wrapped in vaguely left wing language. The fact that several trans employees felt they had to leave is heartbreaking, particularly in a demographic that often find it extremely difficult to find work. It’s stoking a hysteria that’s led to hate crimes, suicide and withdrawal of medical care and contributing to a climate that’s made trans people feel they need to seek asylum. While the bile is always just on this side of the opinion section, some of the claims made in pieces clearly have not been fact-checked. It’s vile, and though I honestly despair of finding another paper with such considered international coverage I can’t in good conscience continue to support them with either cash or even with clicks (the latter being an attitude I formerly reserved for only the most sensationalist and dishonest tabloids). I truly hope that with time this siege will go the way of the gay panic and the paper will take a long, hard look at its editorial decisions. Until then, I won’t be going near it.”
• “It was too lightweight a year or so ago, then got more serious as the election progressed and has remained so; also I was tired of incessant male-bashing by its columnists, though I acknowledge modern males have much more growing to do.”
• “I didn’t read it enough to justify the cost and was more about my trying to keep personal expenses down. I think it’s a great publication.”

The Guardian (Prince Edward Island, Canada)

• “It’s a local paper that covers provincial news here in Canada. They got purchased in 2017 by Saltwire and their newsroom has faced a lot of cuts. The paper is full of filler — there’s no critical analysis of local events or policies. It’s lazy reporting.”

Haaretz (Israel)

• “I find more informative and nuanced sources for information about Israel/ME.”

Hartford Courant

• “Weak reporting of local news that mattered. Stories often lacked context or some basic facts or follow-up.”

Harvard Business Review

• “Moving from France to Brazil, I sent an email asking if it would be O.K. for transferring my address and there would be a charge for that. No answer — just the automatically note saying that I would get an answer. Some days after, I sent a new email. No answer again. It made me think if I really need a printed version. New email sent, asking if I could change my printed subscription by a digital one. Finally, I got an answer that I should apply for canceling the printed one and then subscribe the digital one. So I asked for cancellation. No information on the site neither a note by email saying from when it has been take I consideration … So … not questioning how valuable the content is but I found the site could offer more resources so that you could do these basic things by your own. Surely, there are room for improvements.”

Houston Chronicle

• “I spent 2020 in Covid isolation with my elderly mother and it is the only trustworthy unbiased newspaper in her area of Texas. I have since moved back to my home in Virginia in 2021, and don’t need a third news subscription. I didn’t read it as often once back home. I get both print and digital The Washington Post and digital New York Times.”

Idaho Mountain Express

• “The local publisher and editor censor the local news to fit the publisher’s desire to be a ‘cheerleader’ for the community. So, major stories are not reported and are actively hidden from the public. People do not have the information they need to make informed decisions, and they don’t even know it. I am a graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, this is my local paper and I have direct, personal experience that this is consistently happening. It makes me realize the real damage local newspaper editors can do to the public dialogue.”

Importantville (on Substack)

• “The content wasn’t worth the cost. I simply didn’t get enough valuable information to justify the expense.”

Insider

• “I signed up for the trial period and decided to cancel my subscription because I did not want to pay the monthly or yearly fee. I already subscribe to the NYT, Wall Street Journal, and NY Mag. While there were certain pieces I enjoyed from Business Insider, overall, I did not feel I could justify another business publication subscription.”
• “I signed up while researching Yahoo, I think. It’s pretty expensive ($99/year or $13/month) and I felt like I could get the info elsewhere so I canceled after one month. Hard not to compare to, say, The Atlantic which is $25/year and which produces more singular writing.”
• “They never informed me about renewal charges, and just charged by card. That rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t want to support a publication that tries to trick its users.”

The Intercept

• “Bias, run amok, of the endemic ilk…”
• “Glenn Greenwald is an important voice and I only subscribed to support him.”

The Irish Times

• “They platformed an ‘alt right’ Nazi apologist in their op-ed pages. “
• “Because they are a pro-British propaganda rag that needs to cease publication.”

The Juggernaut

• “It was too expensive and basic for what I was getting. (Just one article a day? And the articles weren’t things I wanted to click on.)”

Knoxville News Sentinel

• “Very little local news content.”

Las Cruces Sun-News

• “It is one of the papers in the USA Today group — that has very limited and poorly written local news coverage and nearly no national stories. I was paying $23.00/month — compared to the WAPO and NYT for which I pay very little, I thought it was time to pull the plug. I very much support local newspapers, but in this case, the value just was not there.”

Le Monde

• “I only wanted 1 specific article. And don’t speak/read French!!!”

Lebanon Daily News (Lebanon, Pa.)

• “They increased cost 2.5x, reduced staff from 16 news reporters to 2, almost cut local news entirely, and often missed delivery. For $2/week, could get better online.”

Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.)

• “Too expensive (>$20 a month).”

Lincoln Journal Star

• “Lack of local investigative stories about politics and economic development projects. Boring wire stories. Even the ridiculous recipes were outsourced to San Jose. Feature writing was insipid. Copy editing was lacking. When the headlines had attempts at puns, they ended up being irrelevant or offensive. Many of the older, better reporters left or were fired just before they reached retirement. There was also a lawsuit about disparate treatment in the photography department. Dumbed down, toothless.”

London Review of Books

• “Too expensive. I’ve found that if I let it lapse they come back with an affordable offer.”

Los Angeles Times

• “Declining product plus excessive bias in news coverage.”
• “Pretty expensive for a site I don’t visit all that frequently.”
• “I can’t afford the full $16/month.”
• “I have too many subs, and the LAT was the low man on the list, and I can not say why. Good paper.”
• “Content kept shrinking, cost too high.”
• “Covid has destroyed my business. I cannot afford 4 news subscriptions.”
• “The login protocol never seemed to work quite right, and support couldn’t fix it. Gave up, even though I didn’t want to.”
• “I was living out of state and they wouldn’t deliver there.”
• “They were double-charging me for a subscription and their customer service is beyond awful. Too bad, because I’d like to be a subscriber, but the double charging me was the last straw (I had a similar nightmare dealing with their customer service 2-3 years ago. I didn’t want to spend an hour in the phone with them again, and the double subscription seemed very shady). Also, I was a subscriber to the print edition for 25+ years, so you know the CS had to be awful for me to cancel.”
• “I found out I don’t even like their content as such.”
• “It wasn’t providing as many different perspective from other places I subscribe too, and when it did (entertainment/The Biz), it wasn’t super relevant to me.”
• “I subscribed because I needed to get several articles from the archive. I kept it for several months because I saw a couple terrific exclusive stories. Dropped it because there were way too few of those and I was almost never reading anything there.”
• “Sport, sport, sport on front pages. Couldn’t see the printed front page which I how I gauge the relative importance of the news. Very average online set-out. No problem with reportage, although think they don’t play to their uniqueness.”
• “I moved from Los Angeles to NYC, and during my 9 years in LA only used it to read LA and SoCal news, not national or international news.”
• “Cost vs. value … I chose to keep the Washington Post as my primary newspaper news source. Had to trim costs after job loss.”

Mediapart (France)

• “In the end i realized i didn’t have the time to reed it. A numerous articles seem biazed or with a useless polemic angle also. Still I think it’s a good media. (Sorry for my English, I’m French).”

Medium

• “Shoddy factual support, shitty writing.”
• “Lack of interesting, relevant stories.”
• “Because I wasn’t getting an update of news and views that I needed and felt it was too much to pay.”

The Mercury News

• “I did not want to cancel it; I had been a subscriber for decades. But the subscription rates skyrocketed at a time when my income was going in the other direction, and the service team was not willing to negotiate an affordable price for me. So things didn’t work out for either of us: I lost a subscription I wanted, and the paper lost a customer they could have kept if they’d been more willing and able to compromise.”

Miami Herald

• “My experience shows what happens when local news organizations want to have a digital subscription business but don’t invest in their technology. I had a digital subscription to The Miami Herald that, despite my best efforts and numerous emails, I could never access. When I logged in, it never showed that I was a subscriber. And I could access any of the paid content. And when I would attempt to log in from the welcome subscriber email, another person’s email/account would appear (clearly some major privacy issues happening). I emailed customer service with detailed descriptions, as well as my concerns about how personal data was being mismanaged, and they were unhelpful and never attempted to really find a solution. Ultimately I gave up and canceled. And my current local subscriptions are to The New Tropic and now the Sun-Sentinel, the newspaper in Fort Lauderdale.”
• “Doubled rate ($9.99 to $19.99/month) BUT real issues was lack of integrity and resulting loss of respect/trust. 1) Told me new rate but did not refresh me on old; I had to research to know was double 2) No cancel subscription button, just a generic customer service link which when you click on it lead to nada that would allow you to cancel … basically they trashed their own brand.”

The Nation

• “My budget is tight these days. There were many expensive and unexpected expenses last year (leaking bedroom roof needing urgent repair; large tree removal due to storm damage; car repair due to winter ice; etc.).”

The National (United Arab Emirates)

• “Topics covered by the newspaper did not resonate with me. The competitor Khaleej Times has different topic coverage and better graphics.”

National Geographic

• “It was too expensive and also being sent to an address I no longer received mail at.”
• “I have too much to read daily as is.”

New Hampshire Union Leader

• “I live in Maine, but worked at the Union Leader for 25 years and like to keep up with the news in New Hampshire. I also have subscriptions to about half a dozen other newspapers across the country — I like local news no matter the location and also want to support journalism.The issue with the UL is that I like to read epapers on my iPad in the epaper format, and their app is just awful. Really really hard to load and navigate, and also I constantly have to put my password back in. I’m actually thinking of also canceling my NYT subscription, too, simply because it keeps not recognizing my password across different platforms and it’s a pain to deal with that, and their epaper takes forever to load and is clunky. On the flipside, the Boston Globe, Washington Post and LA Times have awesome epaper platforms and I read all three every day. (I also subscribe to the Louisville Courier and Seattle Times, but read them less often.) As newspapers go digital, they should have the most user-friendly digital options available and be aware of them. I’m not a huge fan of scanning headline on a website, but prefer to still read in ‘newspaper’ form. Epapers are an important part of the digital product and shouldn’t be an afterthought. If they’re difficult to use, I can get my news somewhere else.”

The New Republic

• “1) The New Republic refocused on being the Democratic party magazine under their new editor. 2)The magazine’s interesting pieces, like book reviews, too often were on the same subject as The New Yorker’s, which I also subscribe to. 3) I took a year-long trial subscription and typically didn’t read more than half of their stories due to lack of interest in them.”

New York Magazine

• “I subscribe to many publications (NYT, New Yorker, Bloomberg, WSJ, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic), as well as many streaming services and my wife and I were trying to reduce our recurring monthly budget for subscriptions. New York magazine seemed to be the least essential relative to the others. I had mainly subscribed last year to read the political commentary of the Intelligencer staff in an election year and after the election was over I had less appetite for this kind of commentary, or at least it seemed less essential.”
• “The author of their ‘Ask Polly’ column left the magazine to start her own Substack newsletter (I didn’t follow her there, btw).”

The New Yorker

• “Did not read it. Too leftist. Constant Trump bashing and anti-Americanism.”
• “Union busting is gross and with other outlets doing equally great reporting, I’m not interesting in paying Condé Nast to abuse their writers.”
• “I wasn’t reading it so I turned off auto-renew, and then I chose not to renew. I think this is kind of funny — I purchased the Financial Times during Covid, because why the heck not, panicked because I had dropped $250 for an immense amount of content I was never going to read, and then I tried to cancel it but realized it wasn’t pro-rated.”
• “The cost is quite high, especially because I am in Canada. I do not have as much time as I would like to read the print magazine. I enjoy the content, but could not justify the cost. I may consider getting a digital-only subscription if I find I am coming up against the paywall frequently.”
• “I work in the news in the U.S. I just got tired of feeling like needing to be on top of everything all the time. Started feeling like I assigned myself homework. Also it was expensive.”
• “Too expensive, couldn’t keep up with the print.”
• “1. I wasn’t able to devote as much time on reading the articles. 2. The subscription fee is expensive.”
• “Too expensive (from Germany).”
• “All of a sudden, I had a $150 (I think) charge on my bank statement that I didn’t expect. That just felt like a lot of money that I didn’t anticipate spending.”
• “It was piling up and I had not read it, and the price was going up as well. I believe I had been a subscriber for 20 years.”
• “Content keeps shrinking while monthly price is surreptitiously rising.”
• “I canceled my subscription after becoming frustrated whilst trying to take out a subscription for a friend as a birthday present. The website was so bad I was unable to get my friend a subscription, even after speaking to customer service. I ended up becoming so frustrated I gave up and even cancelled my own (slightly petty I know…)”
• “I got tired of the abusive up-sell requests labeled as past due bills. I know why they’re doing that but it’s disrespectful.”
• “Didn’t read it as much as expected.”
• “Magazines were piling up, not enough time to get through them and the digital product just didn’t feel the same as print.”
• “I didn’t renew my annual home delivery subscription. I’m reading (and paying for) a lot of longform pieces on Substack lately, and there are only so many hours in a day (and $$$ in my bank account). The pieces that appear in The New Yorker each week are of less and less interest to me. Couldn’t tell you the last feature I read there.”
• “I feel terrible but as much as I enjoy reading their articles here and there online, I found I was never getting through a full magazine and found myself not even getting to an issue before the next would arrive in the mail. I enjoy reading print when I can but I felt bad for the trees as they kept piling up (and felt shame staring at the unread pile) so I canceled.”
• “I did not have time to keep up with it. I continued subs to Atlantic (print) and WaPo (digital) because they were excellent sources of info over the past year. I get WSJ and NYT free through my employer.”
• “I canceled for the reason common to New Yorker subscribers everywhere: the stack of unread issues loomed, and even with the occasional double-issue reprieve, there was simply no catching up. Also, and in case there’s a human reading this: I would like to credit at least 10% of this decision to the New Yorker’s waste of ink, pixels, and staff time on their diaerisis quirk.”
• “Articles too long and of limited interest. Switched to The Atlantic, New York Magazine and MIT Technology Review.”
• “Stories were becoming too precious. Perhaps the editors would say esoteric. They’re not.”
• “Let it lapse because there was no option to not receive the hard copies in the mail and they just kept piling up. I know I should have donated them but I have very little energy after work — I’m clinically depressed and I can’t even keep my house clean very well. It felt wasteful to keep filling up the recycling bin with shiny new unread magazines. (Already read the digital version of the stories I was interested in before getting the mailed issue.) I feel shame about this and I miss not having to ration my click-throughs when I see links to stories I’m interested in.”

The New York Review of Books

• “Couldn’t keep up with it; backlog of issues to read; taking a timeout..”

The New York Times [buckle up!]

• “Corporate-owned, lack of true journalistic integrity, CIA stenographers.”
• “Too Bias!! No more balance reporting!”
• “Frustrated with the inter-newspaper self destruction, and what seems to be an excessive cancel culture that I feel is ultimately self-defeating. I’m basically quite liberal, but I don’t want someone being fired for using the ‘N’ word in a descriptive manner in response to a question.”
• “1) Failure to report perspectives beyond Acela Corridor and formal institutions of power. 2) Editorial content rarely contains perspectives beyond a center-right to center-left spectrum. 3) Almost no accountability for ethical violations, false reporting, or incorrect/inaccurate news. 4) Even after you buy a subscription, you can’t read a story without being bombarded with ads. 5) Fails to accurately present reactionary xenophobia as the lodestar of the modern GOP, instead still presenting center-right, pro-business small government views as mainstream conservative positions.”
• “I thought the paper’s decision to run an op-ed from a sitting senator advocating for the use of military force on American citizens was abominable. The leaders responses to the ensuing controversy showed they weren’t concerned enough about the larger issue, which is who gets a voice in their pages and who doesn’t, and how they have the capacity to harm based on who is allowed a platform.”
• “Their editorial board and op-eds and bad faith framing infected the whole paper. Climate denial and both sides for the sake of it not because they are equivalent. I was sick of paying for it. The algorithm of my home page was never feeding me the hard news and was instead feeding me articles about monocles and people dying their armpit hair. Made it too hard to find out the actual stories. Also I live in California and the reporting about California is for East Coast folks. And I’m sure they’re not hurting as bad as the local papers threatened by hedge-fund apocalypse.”
• “I subscribed after Trump was elected. I wanted to support them, even though I have access through work. But I have become really annoyed with how much the Times has become a left-of-center newspaper. It doesn’t feel balanced anymore. I am left of center, but I need to feel that my news sources are open about where they are coming from. The Times acts like it is objective, but then doesn’t come off that way. Not in all of the reporting of course, which continues to be top notch, but in the presentation. I especially am turned off by the way they present headlines in the push notifications.”
• “David Brooks, ISIS podcast, and multiple similar miscues. Also, I wasn’t reading it as often as I had originally.”
• “Non factual op-ed pieces and BS false equivalence on the news side.”
• “Their attempts to make an issue both sides when it’s obvious there’s only one truth. Continuing to give Bret Stephens a voice is another problem. The only good thing about the Times is Paul Krugman.”
• “It was yet another Bret Stephens column, but I can’t even remember which time or why. It’s been years now. 2017, I think.”
• “I got tired of them giving space on their editorial page to Nazis, warmongers, and racists.”
• “I had been a print (later print and digital) subscriber for 40 years. Despite some world-class news reporting, the paper has become too self-referential, as if its staff are all fascinating creatures. It is chock-full of silly self-help features. Good writing is hard to find. The op-ed columnists are all tiresome, every single one of them, even Krugman. The arts and book review sections are so ‘woke’ that I stopped reading them. ‘Style’ is beyond parody. The Washington bureau political reporting is mostly dreadful. And so on.”
• “I was annoyed by their content.”
• “Lack of inclusivity for BIPOC reporters.”
• “Both sides-ism.”
• “The termination of Donald McClean. He has been the best reporter on Covid from its start. He was nominated for a Pulitzer on the subject, and then got into a spat with his management over his behavior with school kids and treatment of other staff and management. It became a general rant about many long term issues inside the Times management, and they threw him out. He has been writing for the Times many years. Don decided to publish the whole email exchange demonstrating what went on. The Times should never have placed him with these kids for two weeks. The kids were hyper critical. Don was impatient.I’ve been a paid Times subscriber for many years, I’m 75, worked in the UN over 20 years and added years in midtown. Tracking the Times was sometimes part of my work. I simply found the Times management’s treatment of McClean unacceptable and unethical. So I quit them.I continue with WaPo, and have access to the WSJ on line as well. Politico, 538, and the Economist blurb keep me well informed. NPR and PBS are still the best in my view. But, I’m off the Times.”
• “Too much false info and anti-American opinion.”
• “It was a long time coming, but their obsession with Hilary Clinton’s emails and the amplification/promotion of Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential elections disgusted me. And I have no regrets since they continued the both sides false equivalencies all the way through the Trump presidency and 2020 election.”
• “I could not deal with their coverage around specific topics + opinion section *yikes!*”
• “I’ve unsubscribed and resubscribed several times over the years. Most recently when I felt as though they were not holding the Trump administration to task, as well as subtle bothsidesism. I’ve never had the same dissatisfaction with WaPo.”
• “The way they carried water for the Trump admin, never called him out on his lies, whored Maggie Haberman out for access — with no ombudsman or public editor? I just couldn’t put any faith in their reporting.”
• “Political reporting that values the appearance of objectivity over the more risky but enlightening truth-telling that good journalism requires.”
• “Their reporting has declined, their editorial staff is abhorrent and their journalistic principles have eroded to the point where I don’t trust them anymore.”
• “I’ve been increasingly dismayed at their opinion page and I have been upset that they distort the truth à la ‘FBI finds no link between Russia and Trump campaign.'”
• “The misrepresentation of facts, providing a platform in the interests of ‘balanced’ journalism to hateful or disproven ideas, atrocious headlines that skew the intent of an article.”
• “Sympathetic white supremacist profiles.”
• “They appointed Bret Stephens, who is a ‘both sides’-ist of fascists and a climate denier.”
• “Finally fed up with:
  Columnists
  Perceived lack of respect from reporters of readers
  Dropping the ball during the Trump years and being childishly defensive about it.”
• “I didn’t like the framing of stories or those being featured in the opinion section. I also have a subscription to The Washington Post and while I don’t always like what they print, they seem less concerned with ‘both sides’ and more focused on reporting.”
• “Too much giving of platforms to Trump supporters and not enough condemnation of anti-democratic actions (against democracy, I mean, not against the party).”
• “It’s grossly irresponsible in both its coverage and its framing of all aspects of the Trump administration was beyond cowardly.”
• “Baquet had some awful decisions in a row. Was a year or two back.”
• “Because they normalized the Trump administration so much.”
• “Journalistic quality. Some incredibly terrible opinion pieces, but also a lot of poorly contextualized news. Mixing millions and billions. Lack of images or graphics where they would tell a better story. Acting like they are paid by the word instead of being paid to inform me.”
• “Maggie Haberman and 8 million articles about Trump voters.”
• “Their credulous reporting on Republicans and the Trump administration. When the Republican party is actively working to destroy our democracy, it should not be treated as a legitimate political party by journalists.”
• “I couldn’t take the ‘both sides’ political reporting anymore, and the rest wasn’t relevant enough to me to make it worth my while. I often felt unseen or when seen held in contempt. That group of reporters simply don’t care what a middle class black woman thinks about anything unless it’s a way to talk about Black communities as if we are some type of foreigner. Why should I pay for people who are going to be micro-aggressive. Not worth the effort to code switch during my free time.”
• “I was appalled that my subscription was supporting misguided, misogynistic, and cringe-worthy op-ed writers like Ross Douthat and David Brooks. I couldn’t bear to know that I was a participant in spreading their nonsense.”
• “Tom Cotton editorial.”
• “Their politics.”
• “I deemed the newspaper a part of the Trump propaganda problem. They are beholden to tell bothsidesism instead of truth.”
• “Their op Eds or whatever they are calling them now. Brett Stephens had a horrible piece. Then the Tom Cotton op Ed was published about the same time as a negative piece on Ronan Farrow. All three combined made me grow tired of pieces that belonged more in National Inquirer so I cancelled.”
• “Felt elitist. Not as objective, I feel, as the Washington Post. Boring newsletters.”
• “Hard to remember what the particular issue was. Maybe the bothsiderism that downplayed Republican bad faith. Maybe the hiring of another right wing hack for the opinions section. Maybe it was yet another reminder of the Judith Miller bad faith. And I canceled with full knowledge of the crucial role that the NYT plays in American news and politics. They can do better. Cancellation of love.”
• “I’ve subscribed on and off over the past decade or two but had been a digital NYT subscriber for about two years. I’ve valued the Times’ investment and obviously appreciated the wealth of secondary content beyond pure news (Cooking, etc) but publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s editorial — calling for the use of military force against peaceful protestors on U.S. soil — was irresponsible and dangerous. I appreciate the work of bringing diverse ideas to the public, but Cotton’s editorial, was a threat from a powerful legislator, not a contribution to discourse. The NYT’s apparent lack of reflection on why this was a problem — ‘It didn’t meet our standards’ — was the last straw regarding their decisions about what voices from the right to select for inclusion in the paper.”
• “They changed from a great newspaper to a ‘woke’ advocate which only posted politically correct opinion pieces. It went from ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ to ‘All the news that fits with our reporting bias, we print.’The straw that broke the camel’s back was after publishing an op-ed piece supporting conservative views from a sitting U.S. Senator, the NY Times not only published a rebuttal (well, maybe okay) but then they apologized to their readers for essentially practicing journalism, promised it wouldn’t happen again, and then censored, and finally fired the editor who made the decision to expose Times readers to the thinking of the other side.”
• “I cancelled when James Bennet was forced to resign. I’m tired of the growing campus culture throughout the company, and the industry as a whole for that matter, so I’ve cancelled with a few other national news outlets as well. And before you try to paint me as some angry white conservative for not wanting to embrace unchecked left wing radicalism, I’ve just never cared for party politics and have always been socially progressive, but when it comes to news: I want it neutral and objective. I don’t care for the arguments about ‘We’re bias anyhow so we just need to admit it’ nonsense.”
• “Tl;dr: I felt like I was reading a Twitter feed.While there are a lot of well respected journalists at the Times that I enjoy reading, I felt like the quality of their reporting declined, at least in presentation. I couldn’t handle the non-stop updates that came in snippets and bullet points as if every story was ‘breaking.’ Additionally I was turned off by a seemingly endless stream of op-eds. I felt more and more that I had to dig to read full stories. I enjoy the layout and presentation of WSJ. It is the opposite of what I described above. I use Reuters as a supplement because I know WSJ misses some stories. I also do my best to keep up with The Economist.”
• “Too anti-Israel.”
• “Op Eds are a vestiges of an older time and the internal strife they cause newsrooms distracts from good reporting.”
• “Too much gossip, drama and speculation when it comes to politics and government, not enough coverage of how government affects our lives. Think about how local reporters cover city hall and how decisions there affect residents. Not enough of that comes from NYT or the DC media in general. Also, I can read it without paying anyway.”
• “Fake news is the news fit to print.”
• “The ‘Biden wears a Rolex’ story.”
• “Another horrific Bret Stephens column.”
• “There were several reasons that led to it, but the last straw was Tom Cotton’s disgraceful essay calling for military action against American citizens. To think an American newspaper would publish such an anti-democratic screed when its role as the Fourth Estate is to act as a check on the government disturbed me. Yes, newspapers should publish controversial ideas, but platforming direct attacks against Americans was a step too far. It was propaganda published under the false guise of objectivity and both-sideism was intellectually lazy, and that sort of unprofessionalism deserves zero funding. The role of newspapers should aim for objectivity with the goal of promoting democracy. Anything less, and the newspapers fails its core mission.”
• “Reporters normalizing Trump in their stories.”
• “Subscribed at promotional rate, didn’t want to pay full amount.”
• “Because I needed access to articles for work and I don’t have that need anymore.”
• “1. The cost went up. 2. Even though I checked the headlines every day, I rarely read any articles. 3. It is too New York-centric.”
• “Didn’t want to pay, wasn’t using it enough to justify paying, got same info elsewhere, was getting it in print and online, print edition would invariably arrive late or some days not at all.”
• “Frustration about the opinion section (James Bennett, Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens.) I felt like I couldn’t justify the cost any longer.”
• “Money. We have several subscriptions and felt it was overlap.”
• “I lost my job in September and wanted to cut down my expenses.”
• “It was getting more and more expensive and I don’t read it as much as my other subscriptions.”
• “The price doubled for the same service and I didn’t want to pay that much for a national paper. It is also not the only subscription I have. Side note: I am married to the local newspaper editor so we also subscribe to that paper as well.”
• “I couldn’t afford it anymore. Was getting Sunday delivered and digital. When I learned I could access NY Times digital via the local library, I canceled. I find that I go through library for free 24 hour access about twice a week.”
• “I had both NYT and The Washington Post, and I think WaPo does a better job in explaining to readers what they need to know in an authentic, easy-to-understand and sometimes fun way, whereas NYT caters to a primarily white, higher middle- to upper-class, educated base, and you can tell in the story selection and in a lot of the writing. Because of that, I found myself gravitating toward reading WaPo’s stories more than I did NYT, so I just decided to cancel.

While I don’t regret the decision, I do wish I could just buy a subscription to the Styles section because those are the only stories I find myself reading from NYT. They’re always fun and interesting, and they’re written in a relatable, palatable way for the audience they’re serving.

It should also be mentioned that part of the reason I canceled, too, was because I was coming up on the end of a $1/month trial and I didn’t want to pay full price for a product I didn’t see myself in or enjoy reading. (The cancellation process was actually a lot easier than other organizations, so I will applaud that.)”

• “They ‘automatically’ raised the rate by like 4x’s. I canceled so they’d offer me the same low $1/wk digital rate. You can subscribe online, but you have to call or chat to cancel which is the first annoyance. The second annoyance is this introductory pricing — I want to continue to receive the digital NY Times and am very willing to pay for that — but WHAT IS THE REAL COST? I pay about 6x’s their rate to get my local paper. Since they’re willing to take $1/wk as long as I’m willing to cancel to get it, I will be cancelling, and then re-subscribing to the NY Times, once a year.”
• “It’s expensive. I got tired of the bad articles about Los Angeles — I live in LA County — by New Yorkers who don’t know thing one about LA. Their both-sides-ism in the Trump era pushed me over the edge, and I cancelled.”
• “I had to subscribe to the paper for an ethics class my last didactic year of pharmacy school. I cancelled the subscription when the class was over.”
• “I’m a student again and was trying to cut down on my spending. I realized that a lot of NYT articles I want to read I can get through a free subscription at my local library. I also stopped wanting to give them money — a lot of reporters there do great work but some of the opinion/editorial choices and what those choices say about what the paper prioritizes and values really bothered me. I’m not sure if I canceled it right after they published the oped by Tom Cotton, but it was pretty shortly after and their choice to print that was definitely a factor.”
• “My online subscription doubled in price, and I called to see if there was any way to reduce the cost, and there was not.”
• “Because the online subscription went from $5 a month to $35. (I guess I got a special offer.)”
• “I wanted to cancel due to the high cost, $39/month, it included two additional subscribers. I kept it at $14/month and they took one of the extra subscriptions, the cooking section, puzzles and something else I don’t use. I sent a serious letter explaining in detail how foolish they are charging that much. No reply yet but I’ll insist.”
• “Without any notice, they increased the price from the $8 per month I had paid for $8 month to $15 a month. To their credit, when I questioned the charge, they offered me another year at $8 a month paid annually, but I declined. As a retired newsman, I object to the modern practice of inserting opinion in news stories. I am smart enough to recognize a lie, be it from a source or from a newspaper.”
• “I’m from Guatemala, and maybe for someone in the U.S. is not a big spending, I could not afford the subscription for a while.”
• “I couldn’t afford the subscription and it’s not my local paper, so I let it go.”
• “I canceled The New York Times because of how they approached coverage of the prior administration and handled the 2016 election. The ongoing stories trying to understand Trump voters, Maggie Haberman, etc. The Washington Post provided stronger coverage. I still have my Washington Post digital subscription and cut The New York Times’ Sunday delivery. I hope to eventually go back to it. But I have been bothered by how they have handled some personnel issues since then (i.e. Caliphate podcast). Maybe when Dean Baquet exits I’ll consider picking up the Sunday print edition again.”
• “Couldn’t afford it. I love the paper but having little money and an unpredictable income, it was an expense that I could not afford.”
• “Trump out of office, don’t need all the news alerts. Price went up. Want to support more local news agencies.”
• “They wanted to charge me for a full year all at once, which was too much. So they counter-offered half price, paid monthly and I accepted.”
• “Retired and it was too expensive for our budget.”
• “I started a digital subscription with a print copy of the Sunday paper. It turns out where I live (a capital city in western Canada), the Sunday paper isn’t delivered until Monday. I don’t want a giant Sunday paper on Monday, I want it on Sunday when I’ll have time to read it! So the whole thing didn’t make much sense and I canceled. The online sub didn’t seem worth the money without the print paper.”
• “I got so tired of it including links that I needed a supplementary subscription to access (like featured food stories and recipes) that I decided to take a breather and try another option for a while. I think food section should be part of the newspaper but if it isn’t don’t keep showing it to me as if it is…”
• “Customer service was awful. They make it easy to subscribe but SO difficult to unsubscribe. And they’re pushy when you do try to subscribe. They produce great journalism, but they are scam artists when it comes to getting their money.”
• “I had a print subscription for years, however I became aware that the ink they use to print is toxic. I typically reuse the newspaper in my garden or fire pit. I wanted to cancel the print subscription and just get digital, but in order to do that you have to call customer service. It seemed ridiculous that a phone call is required to cancel, when you can sign up just online. Felt like a cheesy, gimmicky way to try to retain customers. I was so irritated that I cancelled the entire subscription.”
• “Not enough time to read. Disingenuously biased in some articles.”
• “Not enough time to read it (already had 3 subscriptions).”
• “Just wasn’t using the subscription enough, i.e., wasn’t reading enough NYT stories to justify a subscription.”
• “Did not have time to read enough of the content.”
• “I’m currently a subscriber but I canceled it several years ago for about a year because I felt the need to simply reduce my media and news consumption following the first couple years of the Trump era. I had no issue with the coverage but needed a mental health break and not receiving the paper every day or having access to the endless app was my way to slow down the firehose.”
• “Wasn’t reading enough to pay for it.”
• “I just don’t have the time to sit and read a newspaper anymore without a long commute on public transportation.”
• “I had too many newspapers, like The Guardian and the TAZ and Der Freitag.”
• “It’s become SO clickbaity. I love a lot of their news and as a New Yorker, it was surprisingly hard to let go of it. Still is! But really, Maggie Haberman is garbage. And they also kicked out that freelance journalist for no reason but Maggie the Trumper stays? Seriously? (I spend time on Twitter.)”
• “Too many instances of making mountains out of molehills, giving platforms to odd people, and having to backtrack from stories and stances. I took the WaPost instead and it’s the wise old grey lady now.”
• “We get much more out of The Washington Post.”
• “Poor journalism.”
• “Too editorialized, over-written, not to the point.”
• “Because it has become a clickbait farm.”
• “Failure to call out Trump from the beginning that he is a liar and a con. And too much both sidisms in reporting. No of course internal systemic racism and bias in leadership and reporting … I won’t even click their link.”
• “I stopped reading it as much and found myself preferring other sites.”
• “Mostly the opinion page. I know news and opinion are separate. But I was tired of paying to be trolled. There’s contrarianism and then there’s trolling. Opinion should also be based in facts but the number of corrections a columnist like Bret Stephens needs after publication are telling. For the handful of NYT stories I feel like I need to read I can use my free articles.”
• “Op-eds calling for the destruction of democracy.”
• “I subscribed to read Jamelle Bouie and stuck with them when I saw 1619 even though I had planned to drop it. I eventually dropped them as I kept getting angry every time they published nonsense sympathetic to new Nazis. I want journalism to reflect the seriousness of our times and represent the true danger our democracy is in rather than the both-sides takes and propaganda they seem to love to peddle.”
• “NY Times billing department kept dunning me to pay twice or more each billing and could not get it straight. I won’t trust it for a long time. The Atlantic I can take for a year, then need a year off to keep from slitting my wrist due to unrelieved dour articles.”
• “The Times does great reporting, but they also routinely give column space in the Opinion section to fact free conservative writers and politicians pushing bigoted and even seditious agendas. For me, the Tom Cotton op-ed was the breaking point. The Times is profitable. They’ll be fine without my subscription, so I decided to direct that money to a local news org instead.”
• “I love the Times, and would read the Sunday edition throughout the week on my commute. Alas, due to covid, I no longer have a commute. And at $40 a month for one day a week, it was hard to justify in the first place. I still have my digital sub.”
• “Lack of time to read and getting digital access free when I started grad school.”
• “Really can’t afford to have it and have it lay unread. Spouse of 57 years passed in March and I’ve discovered reading Sunday alone without the precious, coffee-driven exchange of common enthusiasms is too dark a place for me. Maybe if my whole self gets regathered around a breakfast for one, maybe later. For now, my daily Battle Creek Enquirer and two good local weeklies help keep alive my niche in community.”
• “The physical paper was rarely delivered on time and often we only had the time to read a small portion of the paper. We still have the digital edition, which allows us to read one-off articles at our convenience, instead of in one big go.”
• “Papers piled up.”
• “Too much paper piled up, no time to read it, prefer going all-digital.”
• “Sharp decline in product quality; erratic delivery; able to get all key elements online.”
• “Too little time for reading news articles.”
• “Delivery was slipshod.”
• “Wasn’t getting through everything and papers were piling up.”

Newsday

• “it’s $1 for five months (so, basically free), and after that you just cancel and sign up again under a different email, so it’s basically free forever. And their regular price is ludicrous.”
• “It was too expensive and their app was often glitchy.”

The Oakland Press

• “Had digital subscription only; their website layout was horribly inaccessible for me, a half-blind user. We also didn’t care for its pro-petroleum industries slant.”

The Olympian

• “It was almost $20/month and it still showed me ads when I wanted to read the paper online. It made me log in again every time I wanted to read an article. The Report for America reporter was the only one reporting anything of substance. My partner and I now share a subscription.”

Omaha World-Herald

• “I canceled my digital subscription to the Omaha World-Herald primarily because of what I would assume were glitches within their delivery system. In particular, I had to reload the page sometimes 10, 15 times before it would recognize me as a subscriber so I could read the content. Otherwise, those damn survey questions would come up and I’m paying to not see those. Very strange. Got to be too much of a bother. The final straw, however, came when Lee Enterprises took over the newspaper and the layout changed from one that I preferred and appreciated to the standard Lee newspaper boilerplate web design (I was working for Lee as an editor at the time and my own site looked the same and it just turned me off).”

The Palm Beach Post

• “Couldn’t separate facts from opinion. Give me the facts and I’ll form my own opinion. Every page is their opinion. The newspaper no longer represents the make up of the market. They have a minority mission which is fine but it doesn’t need to be the front page story every day.”
• “This newspaper no longer represents the community. They have an agenda and are trying to ram it down our throats.”
• “Their ‘op-ed’ page was on EVERY page. I buy a newspaper so I can better be informed THEN I will make my own decision. The Palm Beach Post insisted on telling me what I should think on EVERY page!”

The Philadelphia Inquirer

• “Am still working on jumping through the hoops (tried to cancel online, the same way I subscribed, but one has to go through multiple phone calls). I have a daily digital (but their digital edition is dreadful) and print Sunday subscription; the Sunday paper has arrived once in the last 9 weeks. I subscribed to the print daily a decade ago and quit for the same reason. Don’t know why they keep Bartleby on the job.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

• “The rat bastard Block family fired the editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers for being too anti-Trump. There is no other local paper, I would rather do without than support those bastards with even a dime.”
• “Moving to Buffalo.”
• “Owners/editors took a radical turn to the right. Went beyond moving more center to full pendulum swing.”

Politico Playbook

• “The annoying, ‘both sides’ tone of coverage, the false equivalencies, their treatment of politics like it’s a game and that right wing voter suppressions are ‘just a strategy’ rather than a threat to democracy. Really tired of seeing them write headlines like ‘Republicans have cut early voting hours, Democrats say…’ like there’s some legitimate debate on both sides. It started feeling really bad-faith and frustrating so I unsubscribed. Everything I’ve seen recently just shows it’s worse.”

Portland Press Herald

• “I only spend summers in Maine and after the trial price it got too expensive (for me) on top of the Times, Boston Globe, Wash Post, Atlantic, Guardian and New Yorker.”
• “The Press Herald is a fine paper with decent local ownership. I needed access for about a month because of a reporting project I was working on. But please read on, because there’s a point I want to make. As I recall, the only way I could cancel was to call customer service. And calling once didn’t get the job done — a month later I had to call again. Which brings me to one of my pet peeves. Why don’t newspapers offer the option of paying by the article or by the day? It might not be a big business for them, but it would be great for researchers who only need a handful of stories.”

Press Reader (formerly Newspaper Direct)

• “It was a great deal at $30 or so a month, and I bought it for over 8 years. But my fave newspapers started pulling out of the service (most notably, WaPo). I especially liked its international selection, including extensive foreign language papers.”

The Providence Journal

• “They more than doubled the daily subscription price. When I called to ask why they said the cost. I said I was fine with an increase but doubling the cost wasn’t worth it. I canceled then. They called me a month later and offered me a subscription for about a dollar more per week than the old subscription. I declined because I had already found other local news.”

Quartz

• “Too expensive, and they were downsizing.”
• “Subscription price bumped up second year, I was only reading their daily email newsletter (versus spending time on their site), and I already have subscriptions to several other news sources. Quality of their information was fine, I just need to manage costs.”

The Record

• “Lousy news curated by USA Today, not reporting important local news, and too expensive. They’re trying to transfer everything online and doing a poor job of it.”
• “It was taken over by Gannett and no longer reported the county/local news. Not even high school sports scores. It became thin and basically, a throw-away. I didn’t cancel lightly.”

RedAcción (Argentina)

• “One of the journalists answered me that I was too old for that newspaper. She didn’t like a comment I made.”

Renewed Right

• “Lack of truth. Sensational trigger words. My sister say it’s the ‘best’ so to try to understand where she is coming from. Why does she believe what she believes. I got more than enough of an understanding of their point of view. On a day of a big election lie … I jettisoned them.”

Richmond Times-Dispatch

• “Richmond is my hometown and I like how the paper is covering the city and state, but I had to cut expenses and I wasn’t reading it enough to justify another year. I still feel guilty about it.”

The Sacramento Bee

• “The quality of the news has dropped dramatically. It didn’t seem worth it.”
• “It’s no longer the quality newspaper it once was! Even though I live 100 miles from Sacramento, the Bee offered quality in-depth coverage that we don’t get from the Mercury News since it was destroyed by the hedge fund owner. The Bee appears to be going in that same direction. The only decent newspaper in NorCal is the San Francisco Chronicle which I continue to subscribe to.”

San Francisco Chronicle

• “Too many news subscriptions.”
• “I got it when I moved to Bay Area last year. I wanted to get a local feel. Should have gotten the East Bay Times instead because I live in Oakland. My only other subscription is WaPo which has all the national news I need. I was getting Sunday print supplement as part of the subscription which I thought I would like but I did not.”

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

• “The newspaper has become irrelevant. It actually follows the local TV station on many stories. Its in-depth reporting is from Gannett, not local. Writing is freshman-level, few local photos unless someone has contributed them. And delivery was spotty. Out of a 5-days subscription, we were lucky to get delivery for five of those days. Bottom line: It was not worth the cost.”

The Seattle Times

• “I used to work there, and the paper didn’t cover the employees’ subscriptions. When I quit my job, I cancelled the subscription.”

Slate Plus

• “The Mike Pesca thing.”

South Wales Echo

• “Not enough love put into the print product — too many obvious errors that showed that. Change in identity of the paper as costs have been cut — long since amalgamated with Western mail for print content despite retaining separate mastheads in print.”

SpaceFlight Now

• “The exclusive features weren’t great, and I wasn’t making as much use of the site as I thought I would. $50 a year or so was more than I wanted to spend — had it been cheaper I might have kept it. I’m supporting other space-related journalism elsewhere, so I didn’t feel quite as much of an obligation to support something I’m not making use of, and the money can go to other places — in my case, I just upped some of my Patreon spending.”

The Spokesman-Review

• “Paper stopped covering city council and county commission meetings and when asked said no one read those stories and replaced with features and columns, many of which were written by readers/businesses/amateurs. Lack of any coverage of where vaccinations were available and how to get appointments.”

Sports Illustrated

• “After subscribing for almost 50 years I felt cutbacks (staff, frequency of publication, etc.) had essentially gutted a publication that once excelled in telling inspirational human stories produced by great writers, photographers and editors.”

Springfield News-Leader

• “Neither [the News-Leader nor The New York Times] could manage consistent delivery to our downtown loft.”

The Standard-Times (New Bedford, Mass.)

• “Did not cover important community issues. Government, budget, elections, schools, arts and culture of diverse local communities, environmental and business issues, physical development, etc, etc. Coverage largely focuses on high school sports, crime, fatalities. Negative sense of who NB is as a community. Now offering USA TODAY contents!!!!”

Star Tribune

• “My friend and I shared an account to help keep track of local news and local cultural writing. Over the summer of 2020, I attended a protest that occurred outside the Star Tribune’s main office. The speakers described the paper’s willingness to re-publish blatant copaganda without any second thought and reinforce narratives of white supremacy and both-sideism. The following night, my friend and I decided to cancel the account. In the meantime, I have avoided supporting the Star Tribune whenever I can.”
• “Had signed up for a promo for Sunday delivery not long after I moved to Minneapolis but found I never had enough time to get through it on the weekends, and when the cost went up it, I decided it just wasn’t worth it.”
• “Trying to save money wherever possible.”
• “I subscribed after the George Floyd murder to get local coverage on what was happening. But now that the Chauvin trial is over, most of their news is irrelevant to me since I live in DC.”
• “After 40 years as a subscriber, we cancelled the print edition because the carrier could not manage to get the newspaper to the door of our townhome, even after we called several times to explain the problem. The entrance to our home is on street level (no stairs or stoops) and could not be more clearly accessible.”

Statesman Journal

• “I reached my threshold for the garbage I could tolerate. The website is atrocious, with its ubiquitous pop-up ads and videos. It’s hard to distinguish between local and national news on the homepage (and much of it is national). The quantity and quality of local articles has been rapidly diminishing in recent years. And, fortunately, my town has another online news startup where I can get local news.”

Sun Herald

• “My husband and I both grew up in homes with newspaper subscriptions. We signed up for the Sun Herald when we got married in 1997, right along with cable and all the other things to set up a household. My husband works nights in another state and he’s never able to watch traditional TV newscasts. So reading the paper each weekday morning was his main way of keeping up with local news. It was routine.The Sun Herald’s daily newspapers started getting thinner and thinner over the years as they cut back on staff, but we stayed with them long after the rest of our family stopped getting the paper. You see, my husband and I both work in local TV news, so even though I was disappointed as a subscriber, I felt it was important to support my fellow journalists. At my TV station, we actually consider the Sun Herald our main competition because of the quality of their work, even though there’s another TV station in town.The decision to cancel our subscription after 23 years wasn’t one we made easily. It happened when the paper decided to stop publishing on Mon/Tues/Wed. Since weekdays were the main papers we read, we realized it was silly to essentially have a subscription for a Sunday paper we’d never look at.Cutting cable also made us look at our budget for things were buying out of habit vs/ things we were actually using.”

Sydsvenskan (Sweden)

• “I don’t live in Sweden, I’ve never even been to the area the newspaper covers, and I subscribe to ninety-something other newspapers. I subscribed because of a trial offer, and really enjoyed the paper while I was subscribed, but couldn’t justify the expense once the trial ran out.”

Tampa Bay Times

• “I feel a need and obligation to subscribe to one Florida newspaper, where I live 8 months a year. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune offered a $1 for 6 months digital subscription. So I cancelled the Times when the sub expired and signed on for the $1 H-T offer. Short of paying me to take the paper, the offer was too good to pass up. I may return to the Times when the sweetheart deal expires.”
• “Wasn’t using it often enough.”
• “Was repeat of news feed from prior day plus not consistently delivered before I left for work at 6 a.m.”

The Telegraph

• “The reporting on Duchess of Sussex amplifies misogynoir.”
• “Too expensive.”
• “Wanted to read one story on a free trial, then forgot to cancel it.”

The Tennessean

• “I was what should have been The Tennessean’s best customer: I had an annual, paid-in-advance, daily and Sunday subscription. (Home delivery in one of the coveted areas of the city, as opposed to the areas the newspaper has abandoned.) I continued to subscribe even when I became increasingly dissatisfied with paying more for less; especially since what remains of the shrunken paper apparently has no room for any number of neighborhood, local, regional and even under-reported national issues, not to mention original, investigative reporting, that the newspaper is no longer interest in pursuing.Still, short of a buyer, I didn’t want to lose this daily newspaper.With that in mind, and foreseeing another rate increase, I offered to renew my subscription for yet another year at the last price I had been paying.Informed that was not possible, that I would have to agree to EZ Pay autorenewal and the like, I could no longer justify continuing to subscribe.”

Time

• “Wasn’t reading hard copy magazine. Cancelled home delivery but signed up for digital access.”
• “Wasn’t reading it in a timely manner.”
• “I was too busy and they kept piling up and by the time I read them I’d learned 80% on Twitter. I quit time about 3 years ago after reading it for 30 years.”
• “Was having trouble keeping up with each issue. I have a backlog of issues several months old.”

The Times (London, U.K.)

• “I didn’t like their pro-Brexit stance, I wasn’t willing to continue to read a newspaper that I had read daily for 20 years once it became clear that their editorial policy was becoming biased or at the very least nowhere near as challenging of the Brexit lobbyists’ arguments. I still miss doing the crossword and have not replaced the Times with another daily paper.”
• “Because I was furious that they hoodwinked me into paying for a year’s subscription of ‘complimentary’ Nat Geo content.”
• “Wasn’t reading it that often.”
• “Was not reading it often enough, prefer the Guardian, had problems accessing my subscription.”

The Times-Picayune

• “Couldn’t access website easily, SO MANY POPUPS even when I had logged in, other places where I can access the info.”

Times Union

• “TU provided space for public officials, including elected officials to blog on their site. One local official, a rival of my boss (also a local elected official), accused me of having a conflict of interest relative to a position I recommended to my boss on a local issue. He justified it based on my wife’s work for a nonprofit in New York City. He specifically referred to my wife. Both analytically and geographically my local work and my wife’s NYC work were unrelated, but that’s not why I canceled my subscription. I canceled because, in response to my complaint, the TU Editor said that it wasn’t his or the TU’s responsibility to monitor or even review, much less edit, what that elected official published in in their paper. In retrospect, it presaged the attitudes of many online sites today, which disclaim responsibility for what people write on their sites. But I expected a different attitude from a newspaper. Still do.”

The Topeka Capital-Journal

• “Not enough value for the cost. A lot of the reporters I respected left. Also felt like I should put my money into publications that really prioritized quality.”

Toronto Star

• “Biased reporting.”
• “New ownership took the paper in a pronounced right-wing direction. Constant criticism of the federal government (lefty) and none of the provincial government (currently our version of Trump, Doug Ford). Obvious exodus from the paper as well — 30 people quit within a week of the new owners announcing changes. Canada’s last labour/worker’s paper, and it’s now just another centrist rag. I was disgusted.”

Tortoise

• “Wasn’t using it enough.”

USA Today

• “With the advent of the internet I found the written copy to be generally a day late and a dollar short.”
• “Gave up the ghost supporting a failing news operation. There’s nothing — no content — that makes me open the app, so I’m not subject to their ads anyhow. Especially now that any distinctive content is behind a separate paywall.”

The Wall Street Journal

• “Because even $4 a month (on a student discount) is too much for a product whose core offering has increasingly become aggrieved and insane opinion columns about how anyone who has committed the grave sins of [checks notes] voting for Biden, being young or poor or nonwhite, or caring about people who are poor or nonwhite is actually a vile woke-mob leech who viscerally hates America and wants to see it destroyed from within.”
• “The false news and propaganda by Fox News, WSJ editorials and Murdoch properties during and after the Trump regime. Was a daily reader since 1977. Canceled a half-dozen newsletters and podcasts. A small message that I do not support false news in print and broadcast.”
• “The chasm between its fact-based reporting and the grammatically correct, facts-optional dumpster fire that is its opinion pages became too large to ignore.”
• “WSJ has had some good journalism always. But the Murdoch influence became obvious. Not least the tone and angle on the existential threat of climate change and for profit business cause of pollution. Climate from fossil fuels, but also plastics everywhere. The final straw was noticing the toxic political sycophancy to GOP and steady editorial eroding of journalist pieces quality by editing for political purposes. Many good journalists work at WSJ. But I can only imagine how much better their work could be.”
• “I wasn’t really using it and I had issues with their political views that transpired in their coverage of U.S. politics.”
• “I canceled because the editorial and opinions side of the paper started becoming difficult to support financially, even though I appreciated the newsroom’s work and high-quality reporting. It felt like democracy was being undermined and the WSJ’s Editorial Board was supporting it in the hopes that taxes would stay low. By continuing to support them, I was paying for that point of view.”
• “Transparent lies about climate change. The Journal’s disdain for reality is the opposite of credible journalism.”
• “Editorial was no longer focused on balanced business coverage. The politics got in the way and made it no longer a must read for me. Too bad.”
• “As a retired newspaper reporter, I had long subscribed to the WSJ for the overall quality of its news coverage. As a liberal (and onetime editorial page writer) I also wanted to keep abreast of the ‘opposing viewpoint.’ But, Trump got in the way. I became increasingly astonished at the extent Paul Gigot and the Murdocks had drunk the cool aid. I could no longer justify financially supporting their often strident editorials and misleading op ed columns.”
• “The disconnect between its reporting and the often facts optional screeching of the opinion pages became too frequent to ignore. Prior to that, the USPS slowdown meant that I sometimes didn’t receive a newspaper or received four to six at a time, often soggy. I am extremely online, as they say, primarily for work as a writer and editors, but my eyes needed the balm and focus of the print version too as an option. And spending $540 per year on my subscription didn’t feel like a great bargain in the end, especially on my very modest salary. (I’m a black woman living in Philadelphia, the place that haunts Donald Trump’s dreams, and haven’t cleared $50K in years. Not WSJs target audience, I think.) But mostly I cancelled because the opinion pages were increasingly a grammatically correct dumpster fire.”
• “WSJ becoming increasingly Foxified. No longer clear that the politics of its owner and editorial board was not affecting news coverage.”
• “I thought their editorials helped elect Donald Trump.”
• “Anti-Trump, anti-MAGA.”
• “I was in on a promotional rate and the rate went up to the normal rate of like $38 a month. I like the journal but I pay that amount or just a little bit more than that a year for newspapers that I read more often and consider more critical to my day-to-day life. I would have certainly kept it at the promotional rate but customer service wasn’t dealing and my only choice was to cancel. I’m surprised that they don’t understand that a little money is better than no money.”
• “I could get it on Apple News for way less.”
• “Too expensive.”
• “A sudden spike on subscription fees.”
• “Too expensive, pure and simple. Love reading it otherwise.”
• “Too expensive at $45 a month for digital only.”
• “Didn’t read it enough to warrant the cost.”
• “The Op-Ed section was getting too ridiculous. They were also very expensive compared to other options. The final straw was the op-eds though.”
• “Too expensive.”
• “Quite expensive and I have subscriptions to other dailies that cover similar topics (FT, NYTimes).”
• “1-trying to save money, 2-worked 2 jobs, hard to keep up with reading the paper, 3-later became disenchanted with coverage.”
• “The debit card I had on file for the automatic payments was to an account I was trying to close. I got my checking account balance down to zero before I closed it, but then I forgot about the automatic subscription payments, so I got charged overdraft fees at least twice. Meanwhile, you cannot update your payment information on the WSJ website. I wanted to remain a subscriber, so I emailed or sent a message through the website asking for help with updating my payment information. I got a response a few weeks later, and the gist was that I had to call in to change my account information. I just closed the checking account and didn’t bother to update the payment information. I don’t understand a business making it that difficult to continue paying them. I haven’t made any other attempts to update that info with WSJ.”
• “After two months of emails to subscriber support, I gave up. I never could log in or change my password or read anything. It was a terrible experience.”
• “I had intended to only take advantage of the two months of trial. Despite putting a warning in my calendar, it somehow charged me before I thought it should. I struggled to cancel it. I could only cancel by calling an operator. He tried to convince me of other reasons for staying as a subscriber. The main one was that I could receive automated audio of articles. I told him WSJ was a fine publication but I simply didn’t have time to read much of it.”
• “I’ve subscribed to too many outlets, which I don’t use on a regular basis — rather to have access to particular articles I need. I’ve ended up paying for publications, but not using them. I’ve been recently cutting down on those I use rarest.”
• “Because I wasn’t reading.”
• “I had to sign up for WSJ for a college business class I took a year ago but never read it outside of the class.”
• “Never got around to reading it.”
• “Discounted subscription period ended. And I felt I do not really use (need) it.”
• “I bought it because I wanted to access a specific article, cancelled it as there was no other article on there that I wanted to access for the month or two I had a subscription.”
• “Its grabber hard news stories were becoming more infrequent while its weekend sections (Off Duty, Review, etc.) increasingly looked incoherent as to thematic purposes (as opposed to Mansions which is well mated to tracking living large). They’re now asking me to take a second chance, and I may.”
• “Editorials seemed written for an audience of older people who would like to feel superior to younger people. I’m interested in technology but their ‘future of everything’ content was too much about gadgets and not enough about advances in machine learning and AI. The content was not academic or technical enough. I wanted deeper dives. I replaced it with subscriptions to MIT Technology Review and newsletters about technology and social media platforms (The Download, Platformer, etc.)”
• “The editorial/opinions. There are two main reasons. I was dismayed at their (awful) response to the newsroom about meeting organization standards for truth and facts. I then became overwhelmingly weary of their negative response to seeming everything. It wasn’t so much the conservative stance but rather a true lack of solution-based opinions.”
• “At nearly $40/mo, it’s just unaffordable.”
• “Good as it was, was not getting around to reading it.”

The Washington Post

• “Cost — not that it was very expensive, but my budget is really limited. NYT has more overall that I read.”
• “Wanted news but all I got was opinion masked as ‘analysis.’ Way short on the facts like they would pre-digest the food for me and I should just trust them. Then discovered I was paying way more than others. Sneaky. Now they’re offering me all kinds of special deals. Too late. NYT was up front about different deals from get-go. So re-upped there.”
• “I just got sick of the ‘both sides’ journalism; I’m sorry but there’s no ‘both sides’ to people trying to overthrow the government after a free and fair election, or treating Black people like garbage because they’re Black. All of those things are wrong and I’m over news organizations acting like they aren’t. It’s just not worth my money; I can get the basics from a lot of free sources.”
• “I could not find local news that I’d grown to love. So much of the food and social features had an overwhelmingly white gaze to them. It was tiring.”
• “Last straw: they sponsored a conversation with the seditionist and traitor Josh Hawley. After months and months of both-sidesing and covering awful racist Trump voters.”
• “They gave Senator Josh Hawley a platform to promote his book. I have zero tolerance for the Senator, who is largely responsible for the events on 1/6, and offering him a platform to continue to lie.”
• “Jeff Bezos has enough money.”
• “I was protesting their policy of not allowing women who experienced sexual assault to report on it, as made public by reporter Felicia Sonmez. (They eliminated the policy, but I will not be re-subscribing).”
• “Too much sympathy for aggressors, villainization of oppressed people, and other such typical mouthpiece of the state shit. Usual mainstream media status quo protection from an outfit owned by a billionaire. Not worth my time. I was hoping they’d be better than The New York Times, and they were, but better doesn’t always mean good enough.”
• “Both-sides bullshit.”
• “News stories that glaze over the truth. Misleading headlines.”
• “Jeff ‘fucking’ Bezos.”
• “Neoconservative ed page was contemptuous of my country, Canada. Also, post-Trump did not need the Post. I am a journalist in Toronto.”
• “I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post during the 2020 presidential election because every time I went to the website the headlines indicated the news organization was only reporting on the incumbent, President Trump, and there were very few articles about the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. I felt like I couldn’t get a good sense of what all candidates were saying, the outlet was just so focused on one candidate and that’s what the website reflected. This is what the Washington Post website basically looked like:
  trump
  trump
  trump
  trump
  trump
  trump and biden
  trump
  trump
  trump
  trump
  biden
  trump
  trump
  biden
  trump
  trump
  trump.”
• “The paper went from being a liberal leaning news source to a totally partisan ‘woke’ outlet, where certain news subjects (the situation at the border) disappeared from coverage because the actual facts would have offended some readers.”
• “Slanted news coverage and I got bored reading it.”
• “1) They charged me $80 but I saw other offers for $29. 2) Its vigilance was so blatantly directed solely at Pres. Trump & was blind to the political hypocrisy of others incl. itself. Unfair editorial judgments. No longer a real newspaper. A very prejudicial opinion publication masquerading as news.”
• “I moved from the DC area a while back, but kept my subscription until they raised the rates a month or two ago. I was hoping I might get an offer to stay and resubscribe at my regular rate, but no dice.”
• “Renewal rate is 5x higher than initial.”
• “Did not feel worth the money, and I felt bad supporting Jeff Bezos.”
• “First year at 29.95 was good deal. Full price not so much … so I bought a gift subscription for my brother (New Me) for 29.95 … One month later they offered the old me an additional year at 29.95. Shows my price point is between 29.95 and list price. Probably very very close to 29.99.”
• “Totally economic reasons. As a foreign subscriber (from Turkey) economic instability causes these subscriptions cost more even though I pay the same amount in USD. This occasionally forces me to unsubscribe from some outlets or can’t afford some I want to subscribe.”
• “My discounted first year came to an end and I didn’t find it relevant enough any more to resubscribe.”
• “I recently had to replace my decrepit and wheezing HVAC system, and I paid to do so through a long-term loan. Looking to reduce recurring monthly expenses to make a little room room for this added cost in my monthly budget, I thought about my various subscriptions. As a journalist, I read the Washington Post every day, love it, have friends who work there, etc. But also the $8/month I paid for it could help a bit towards my new AC. And — crucially — my newsroom has a digital subscription to the Post. So I hunted down the paper’s log-in info and cancelled my personal account. I also cancelled Amazon Prime. So $21 less each month of my money going to Jeff Bezos. Hopefully he’ll survive.”
• “Not worth the cost.”
• “Price increase. Opinion page too liberal.”
• “$144 per year!”
• “Prefer the NY Times and couldn’t afford both.”
• “The lower priced deal I took part of ran out and renewal cost quite a lot more, which made it unnecessary to renew since I only got the subscription to see if it’d hook me and get rid of the incessant pop up that blocks the site every time I click a Washington Post link.”
• “I wasn’t reading enough articles from it to justify the price. I’m on welfare so the pennies really matter to me.”
• “Price and quality of reporting.”
• “I subscribe to three different news orgs (Washington Post, Boston Globe, and The Daily Beast). In order to save a bit of money this year with my spouse’s unemployment continuing, I decided to cut down a bit and stuck to my local paper (the Globe) and the Daily Beast. I like the Post, but I read more from the others.”
• “Too expensive. I’m retired. It was that or the N.Y. Times.”
• “6 mo promo pricing was ending and I did not read it enough to justify the cost.”
• “I subscribed to Apple News so it felt like paying double. Also, I almost never used the app.”
• “Attempt to reduce expenses.”
• “I was forced to subscribe to read one article I needed to write another article.”
• “The technical headache. Every few days it seems I had to re-sign in, and often that didn’t work. I don’t have this problem with the NY Times. Post stories are great and they break a lot of news, but signing-in headaches take their toll. (I know, just looking at what I wrote is a crybaby first-world problem, especially considering I want to support journalism … but that is the honest reason.) I likely will give them another go at some point.”
• “We got confused in our home about who was subscribing to what things and believed we actually were paying for two WaPo subs.”
• “I have an NYT subscription and WP wasn’t giving me as much bang for my buck it felt like it feels like because I’m more likely to read an NYT article. Also, I really hate the WP website and feel like the way the articles are formatted are distracting. I feel like they didn’t invest in UX design the same way the NYT does. I think maybe another reason I’m more likely to read NYT articles because reporters appear on my social feeds more.”
• “With the varied ways of gaining access to articles, credentials were a problem. 50% of the time my spouse could not access an article, and credential entry seemed to not work. Even with a paid subscription access to articles was cumbersome and fraught. Not worth paying for pain.”
• “I wasn’t reading as much post-election, I got the alert in Gmail ‘you haven’t opened these emails in awhile’ and then the credit card expired. Incidentally my New Yorker credit card expired too, but they just keep sending it.”
• “I didn’t read it as much as I had hoped (only the digital version was available where I live, and I think I would’ve read that more often, but I understand the limitations).”
• “Because I did not read it as frequently as the others I’m subscribed to.”
• “I couldn’t keep up with the reading.”
• “I wanted one U.S. national news subscription, and it was either going to be the NY Times or The Washington Post. I tried both, and found I was reading more on the NYT site. Also, I am put off by Jeff Bezos owning the Post. He has enough power and money already, he doesn’t need my subscription.”
• “I have been spending too much time reading the, more or less, same news stories in different papers. I also dumped the Globe and Mail. I get the Toronto Star, NYT, LAT. That’s almost too much.”
• “My wife started a New York Times print subscription (print so that our kids would see us reading) and it felt duplicative. We’re in Arizona and subscribe to the AZ Republic (digital), too. Two feels like enough.”
• “I got a Washington Post subscription a year ago for $29. It was coming up for renewal and it would have been $100 for the next year. I went to cancel it earlier this week and before I clicked all the way through, they offered me another discounted subscription for $29 for another year. So I did not cancel it. But I would have, strictly because I didn’t want to pay $100 for it.”
• “Two reasons. (1) I grew to hate the click-baity style of headlines they started using (‘First sentence states a fact in semi-alarming terms. Second sentence states unexpected consequence or dramatic/alarming twist.’) (2) Even though I consider myself to be broadly in alignment with the values that I assume WaPo champions, it was bothering me to see editorial creep into the news side. I know that’s a big ‘thing’ to talk about these days — how no journalist is truly neutral, false equivalency is dangerous, etc. — but I started to worry that I couldn’t trust the articles I was reading, because I couldn’t trust that the journalist or editor was being completely honest or acting in good faith. I forget which specific article or articles finally caused me to cancel, but it probably wasn’t any single one, just too many in a row that upset me and made me lose faith. (I canceled over a year ago and I don’t have a great memory.)”
• “They had too many clickbait-style articles. I’d see a headline that looked interesting, go to the article and find that it was an opinion piece, not news. Or that it has a little fragment of news in it, with a lot of speculation around it. I decided that I didn’t need a newspaper subscription for that kind of material. I feel that it’s dishonest and shows that they are wasting the skills of their real reporters and the attention of their readers.”
• “I have NYTimes and WaPo was redundant.”
• “The Washington Post’s entire focus since 2016 has been Donald Trump, even after the 2020 election. Love him or hate him, there is a lot more going on in the world. In particular, this focus has been to the detriment of its local news coverage.”
• “There seemed to be an excess of opinion writing in the Post, and I’d rather fund reporting. I’m also Canadian so am trying to keep my money here unless I truly will read/use the content regularly. I still subscribe to the NYT because I listen to The Daily so much. I didn’t have that connection to the Post.
  Basically because of Mark Thiessen, also Gary Abernathy, Hugh Hewitt, etc. Tired of news organizations giving legitimacy to bad faith arguments and actors in the name of rage clicks and both-sidesism.”
• “Already have NYTimes. Redundant.”
• “Got an incredibly cheap subscription. Canceled because tantalizing alerts didn’t pay off, few stories grabbed me (some sports did), voice and coverage didn’t differ enough from NYT, plus I have a friend whose stuff I looked for, didn’t find enough of it — part of larger discomfort with navigating the paper.”
• “I am a huge consumer of journalism and a retired 50 year journalist and publisher. I am not angry at the Post or the New York Times, but I tend to be buried by the depth of the national coverage. I have the same problem with The Economist. Great information, but if I swallowed it all, I would have time for nothing else. One of the functions of a good editor has always been to make the information bite-sized. It would be helpful if there were additional deeper stories available linked at my option, but the tendency has been just to make the main story longer. Sorry that I’m rambling on, but I think we need to consider the way news worked in the previous incarnation. We were served up huge buckets of information and part of what we did by necessity was boil it down somewhat because of size limitations. That may have been a good thing in retrospect and something we should keep in mind as we design a new business model.”
• “I decided to switch to paying for the Financial Times as I now live in the UK and the content is closer to what I need for work.”
• “In the early stages of Trump it seemed like they were doing things others weren’t, but I gradually felt less excited about its originality and it’s not as well rounded in terms of arts and food as the NYT, which I also subscribe to. Also I absolutely hate giving Jeff Bezos money. I subscribed to my local paper, the Toronto Star, instead, it’s come out of a long slump. The Covid coverage has been phenomenal and personally useful.”

The Week

• “Subscription price more than tripled and mail service where I live is unreliable (I’ve missed several issues). Besides, my local library offers access to this and many other (digital) magazines free.”

Weekendavisen (Denmark)

• “Weekendavisen is the best newspaper in Denmark. No doubt. It comes out every Friday and I always feel more enlightened after reading an article. But even though it’s not daily I simply don’t have the time and the calmness (two small children) to read more than one article a week from the paper. And then it’s just too expensive to have a subscription.”

Wired

• “Worth $10/year, but they jacked up the price to $30/year and that was too much given how slim they are these days. I have been reading it since the very first issue. My strong preference is for some bundle like Apple News Plus to include most things I want.”
• “I had 4 issues of the paper magazine waiting to be read, but when I looked at them they didn’t interest me. I had online access, but I hardly ever found something to read there any more. For any category you can name, tech news, politics, culture, someone else was doing it better than Wired.I started subscribing to Wired in the 90’s when I read an article that Neal Stephenson wrote, about following a cable around the world. It was long and epic and the only paper copy of Wired I’ve saved this whole time. It was like nothing else.My readership of all magazines has ebbed and flowed over the years, and I realized I’ve gradually let go of everything else already, and Wired was the last. I was sad to do it, but the cost was creeping up and up, and the value decreasing. I doubt they will last many more years, and I feel a bit of guilt about that (which is why I kept the paper subscription so long, frankly).”
• “The very low trial subscription price expired and I didn’t want to pay the rate to continue, although I thoroughly enjoyed the publication and its content.”
• “I just didn’t have time to read it and while it was dirt cheap at $12 a year, I just couldn’t justify it. I’ve become slowly feeling trapped by online news writing. What I mean by that is, it’s never ending and yet I cannot remember a single word a week later … but print; I can remember entire passages years later and I tend to ‘get it’ better compared to online and yet … I just feel like my reading habits have slowly been transformed over the past year. I sound like an old coot but I just process info better the old way.”
• “Ehh, loved the magazine but couldn’t keep up.”
• “Not as relevant to my day-to-day interests as I thought it might be.”
• “More of its articles began to seem silly or irrelevant to me.”

Wyoming Tribune Eagle

• “I moved from Wyoming to Georgia and devoted those funds to a different local news outlet.”