Dem
47
GOP
53
Other than the legitimate journalists who are caught up in a mess that is not their fault, it's hard not to root against The Washington Post these days, given its editorial spinelessness and its plutocratic owner.
And now, there's a new reason to dislike the paper (and its owner). Everyone knows that hundreds of thousands of subscribers jumped ship thanks to the Post's new editorial policy. And the management decided to reward those stalwarts who remained by... exploiting them to the hilt, aided by algorithms and AI. The newspaper's website asked people to agree to cookies and other data collection activities, promising them that would make for a better experience. Then, the Post crunched that information, and used it to calculate the maximum subscription price they could extract from each user. If you visited the website multiple times per day, read a lot of reviews of fancy restaurants, clicked on stories about the newest vehicle made by BMW, enjoyed columns about the stock market, etc., then the paper would give you a subscription price fit for a king. This approach is generally known as surveillance pricing.
The reason that this is getting attention right now is that the Post has been sued by D.C. resident Chelsea Blink, who is trying to get the newspaper's current and past subscribers recognized as a class. The damages could, according to one calculation, reach into the billions of dollars.
This suit has a long, long, long way to go before bearing any fruit (if it ever does). And even then, the payout probably won't be in the billions of dollars. However, there are a lot of worse things in this world than Jeff Bezos losing at least a little of all that coin in his bank account. And it's also nice when the shady practices of a business are exposed to a little sunlight. (Z)