Cheddar RSS

LONDON (AP) — British chef Jamie Oliver is on the case of the stolen cheddar.

Oliver, who rose to fame as “The Naked Chef" on TV by stripping food down to its essentials, got cheeky in an otherwise serious plea to his social media followers to help solve the mystery of the missing 22 metric tons (48,488 pounds) of award-winning cheddar worth 300,000 British pounds ($390,000) that was stolen in a scam.

Calling it the “grate cheese robbery,” Oliver told his 10.5 million Instagram fans to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese.”

Nearly 1,000 wheels of cloth-wrapped artisanal cheddar were swiped from Neal’s Yard Dairy by a con artist posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer, the company said. The cheese was gone before the company realized it had been scammed and reported the theft Oct. 21.

“If the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is! Let’s find these cheese stealers,” Oliver wrote.

Cheddar, which is named for the village in southwest England where it originated, is the world's best-known cheese because it does not have the protected status of other regional products like champagne and, thus, is produced in many countries. But there are only a small number of real British cheddar makers, Oliver said.

“These are some of the cheeses, or most of them, that got nicked,” he said in a video accompanying his post.

The cheeses were from three makers: Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar.

Detectives at Scotland Yard and international authorities are searching for the culprits.

Neal's Yard Dairy, a distributor, wholesaler, and retailer of British artisanal cheese, has asked international cheesemongers to be on the lookout for the stolen cheese, particularly in 10-kilogram (22-pound) and 24-kilogram (52-pound) blocks.

“If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong’uns,” Oliver said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers added just 12,000 jobs in October, a total that economists say was held down by the effects of strikes and hurricanes that left many workers temporarily off payrolls. The report provided a somewhat blurry view of the job market at the end of a presidential race that has pivoted heavily on voters’ feelings about the economy.

Last month’s hiring gain was down significantly from the 223,000 jobs that were added in September. But economists have estimated that Hurricanes Helene and Milton, combined with strikes at Boeing and elsewhere, had the effect of pushing down net job growth by tens of thousands of jobs in October.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the unemployment rate remained at 4.1% last month. The low jobless rate suggests that the labor market is still fundamentally healthy, if not as robust as it was early this year. Combined with an inflation rate that has tumbled from its 2022 peak to near pre-pandemic levels, the overall economy appears to be on solid footing on the eve of Election Day.

The government did not estimate how many jobs were likely removed temporarily from payrolls last month. But economists have said they think the storms and strikes caused up to 100,000 jobs to be dropped. Reflecting the impact of the strikes, factories shed 46,000 positions in October.

In a cautionary sign for future hiring, though, temporary job placement firms lost 49,000 jobs last month. Companies often take on temporary workers before committing to full-time employees. On the other hand, healthcare companies added 52,000 jobs in October, and state and local governments tacked on 39,000.

The employment report for October also revised down the government's estimate of the job gains in August and September by a combined 112,000, indicating that the labor market wasn't quite as robust then as initially thought.

“The big one-off shocks that struck the economy in October make it impossible to know whether the job market was changing direction in the month,’’ Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank, wrote in a commentary. “But the downward revisions to job growth through September show it was cooling before these shocks struck.’’

Still, economists have noted that the United States has the strongest of the world’s most advanced economies, one that has proved surprisingly durable despite the pressure of high interest rates. This week, for example, the government estimated that the economy expanded at a healthy 2.8% annual rate last quarter, with consumer spending helping drive growth.

Yet as voters choose between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, large numbers of Americans have said they are unhappy with the state of the economy. Despite the plummeting of inflation, many people are exasperated by high prices, which surged during the recovery from the pandemic recession and remain about 20% higher on average than they were before inflation began accelerating in early 2021.

With inflation having significantly cooled, the Fed is set to cut its benchmark interest rate next week for a second time and likely again in December. The Fed’s 11 rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 managed to help slow inflation without tipping the economy into a recession. A series of Fed rate cuts should lead, over time, to lower borrowing rates for consumers and businesses.

In the meantime, there have been signs of a slowdown in the job market. This week, the Labor Department reported that employers posted 7.4 million job openings in September. Though that is still more than employers posted on the eve of the 2020 pandemic, it amounted to the fewest openings since January 2021.

And 3.1 million Americans quit their jobs in September, the fewest in more than four years. A drop in quits tends to indicate that more workers are losing confidence in their ability to land a better job elsewhere.

Even so, with the unemployment rate and the number of people seeking unemployment aid each week still uncommonly low, Americans as a whole continue to enjoy unusual job security

“The cooling of the jobs market is still ongoing,’’ said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. “Overall, the jobs market — it’s not falling apart, but it’s too early to say that conditions have stabilized.’’

For employers, a softer job market is easing the labor shortages that left many of them struggling to find and keep workers over the past few years.

Jon Abt, co-president of Abt Electronics in Chicago, said it has become somewhat easier to hire, and his company has felt less pressure to raise wages this year. Still, finding qualified installers and service technicians remains a challenge.

The electronics retailer, which employs 1,750, including 200 part-timers, runs its own training program, works with trade schools to find workers and also receives applicants by referral. If the job market deteriorates further, Abt said, “it will be easier to find quality people we are looking for.”

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AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio in New York contributed to this report.

SEATTLE (AP) — The union representing striking Boeing factory workers says members will vote Monday on a new contract offer from the company that provides slightly bigger wage increases than an offer that was rejected last week.

Boeing 's latest offer would raise wages 38% over four years, or a compounded increase of about 43%, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said Thursday.

Boeing in a statement Thursday said the company was also offering a $12,000 contract ratification bonus, up from $7,000 offered previously. Additionally, the company said it would increase its contribution to employee 401(k) plans.

About 33,000 IAM members have been on strike for seven weeks, shutting down production of most Boeing airline jets including the company's best-seller, the 737 Max.

The strike began Sept. 13 when more than 94% of workers voting rejected an offer of 25% over four years. Last week, 64% shot down a proposal that would have raised general wages 35% over four years.

The union originally demanded 40% in raises over three years and restoration of traditional pensions, which were frozen for then-current workers and not extended to those hired after January 2014. Workers on picked lines in the Seattle area have stressed pensions, but the company based in Arlington, Virginia, is unwilling to bend on the issue.

Boeing has said that average annual pay for machinists is currently $75,608.

The last Boeing strike, in 2008, lasted eight weeks and cost the company about $100 million daily in deferred revenue. A 1995 strike lasted 10 weeks.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Amazon reported a boost in its quarterly profits Thursday and exceeded revenue estimates, sending the company’s stock up in after-hours trading.

For the three months that ended on Sept. 30, the Seattle-based tech giant posted a revenue of $158.9 billion, higher than the $157.28 billion analysts had expected.

Amazon said it earned $15.3 billion, higher than the $12.21 billion industry analysts surveyed by FactSet had anticipated. Amazon earned $9.9 billion during the same period last year. Earnings per share were $1.43, higher than analysts’ expectations of $1.14.

Net sales increased 11% compared with the third quarter of 2023, Amazon said.

Thursday’s report offers a last look at Amazon’s business before the start of the holiday shopping season, the busiest time of year for the retail industry.

“As we get into the holiday season, we’re excited about what we have in store for customers,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon's president and CEO. “We kicked off the holiday season with our biggest-ever Prime Big Deal Days and the launch of an all-new Kindle lineup that is significantly outperforming our expectations; and there’s so much more coming."

The company said it expects revenue for the fourth quarter to be between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion, compared with the $186.29 billion forecast by analysts.

The better-than-expected earnings come after Amazon missed revenue estimates last quarter,.

Amazon reported its core online retail business pulled in $61.41 billion in revenue this in the third quarter. Those figures include sales from the company’s popular Prime Day shopping event held in July. Though Amazon does not disclose how much revenue comes from the 48-hour shopping bonanza, it said this year’s event resulted in record sales and more items sold than ever before.

The e-commerce company held another discount shopping event for Prime members earlier this month, a strategy it rolled out two years ago in order to ahead of the holiday shopping season. Sales for that event will be included in Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings report.

The company’s results follow other earning reports this week from tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet.

Amazon Web Service, the company’s cloud computing unit and a main driver of its artificial intelligence ambitions, reported a 19% increase in sales to $27.5 billion. The boost in sales comes as the company, like others of its caliber, is ramping up investments in data centers, AI chips and other infrastructure needed to support the technology.

During a call with reporters in August, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky noted the company had spent more than $30 billion during the first half of the year on capital expenditures and that the majority was spent on AWS infrastructure. Those investments, he said, were expected to increase during the second half of the year.

Just this month, Amazon said it was investing in small nuclear reactors, following a similar announcement by Google, as both tech giants seek new sources of carbon-free electricity to meet the surging demand from data centers and generative AI. Meanwhile, last month, the company inked a multi-year deal with the chipmaker Intel, which will create some custom AI chips for AWS, adding to those the unit already produces on its own.

Amazon’s capital expenditures jumped year-over-year from $12.48 billion to $22.62 billion, driven in large part by its investment in technological infrastructure, such as data centers and Nvidia GPUs used for AI.

During an earnings call Thursday afternoon, Jassy said Amazon is using generative AI “pervasively” across its businesses, including AI-powered shopping in parts of Europe, Canada and the United States. Amazon also recently debuted AI shopping guides for consumers, which help customers to find products, he said, as well as an AI assistant that “offers tailored business insights to boost productivity and drive seller growth.”

“The increase bumps here are really driven by generative AI,” he said on the call.

Jassy told investors that both AWS and AI require the company to invest in data centers, networking gear and hardware upfront. A lot of those assets — such as data centers, he said — can be useful for decades.

“It is a really unusually large, maybe once in a lifetime type of opportunity,” he said, “and I think our customers, the business and our shareholders, will feel good about this long-term, that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”

Regulators have been scrutinizing Amazon’s other partnership with the AI startup Anthropic, which is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and the company’s custom chips to build, train and deploy its AI models. Amazon got some good news in September when British competition authorities cleared its partnership with Anthropic.

The relationship and others like it, however, continue to face scrutiny in the U.S. by the Federal Trade Commission. Headed by Big Tech critic Lina Khan, the FTC has brought an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging the company is stifling competition and overcharging sellers on its e-commerce platform.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Apple snapped out of a recent iPhone sales slump during its summer quarter, an early sign that its recent efforts to revive demand for its marquee product with an infusion of artificial intelligence are paying off.

Sales of the iPhone totaled $46.22 billion for the July-September period, a 6% increase from the same time last year, according to Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter report released Thursday. That improvement reversed two consecutive year-over-year declines in the iPhone’s quarterly sales.

The iPhone boost helped Apple deliver total quarterly revenue and profit that exceeded the analyst projections that sway investors, excluding a one-time charge of $10.2 billion to account for a recent European Union court decision that lumped the Cupertino, California, company with a huge bill for back taxes.

Apple earned $14.74 billion, or 97 cents per share, a 36% decrease from the same time last year. If not for the one-time tax hit, Apple said it would have earned $1.64 per share — topping the $1.60 per share predicted by analysts, according to FactSet Research. Revenue rose 6% from last year to $94.93 billion, about $400 million more than analysts forecast.

But investors evidently were hoping for an even better quarter and appeared disappointed by an Apple forecast that implied its revenue for the October-December quarter covering the holiday shopping season might not grow as robustly as analysts envisioned. Apple's stock price shed about 2% in Thursday's extended trading, leaving the shares hovering around $221 — well below their peak of about $237 reached in mid-October.

The latest quarterly results captured the first few days that consumers were able to buy a new iPhone 16 line-up that included four different models designed to handle a variety of AI wizardry that the company is marketing as “Apple Intelligence.” The branding is part of Apple’s effort to distinguish its approach to AI from rivals such as Samsung and Google that got a head start on bringing the technology to smartphones.

Even though the iPhone 16 was specifically built with AI in mind, the technology didn’t become available until Apple released a free software update earlier this week that activated its first batch of technological tricks, including a feature designed to make its virtual assistant Siri smarter, more versatile and more colorful. And those improvements are only available in the U.S. for now.

“This is just the beginning of what we believe generative AI can do,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during a Thursday conference call.

Cook said plans to expand the AI iPhone features into other countries in December, as well as roll out other software updates that will inject even more of the technology in the iPhone 16 and two high-end iPhone 15 models that are also equipped with the special computer chips needed for the slick new features. The December expansion will include an option to connect with OpenAI's ChatGPT to take advantage of technology that Apple isn't making on its own. More languages

Investors are betting that as Apple’s AI becomes more broadly available, it will prompt the hundreds of millions of consumers who are using older iPhones to upgrade to newer models in order to get their hands on the latest technology.

“We believe it’s a compelling upgrade reason,” Cook asserted. But Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro believes iPhone sales would already be accelerating at a faster pace if consumers were blown away by Apple’s AI technology, increasing the pressure on the company “to do an overall better job to impress the public.”

Starbucks’ new CEO, Brian Niccol, has unveiled the first steps of his plan to reverse the java hut’s fading fortunes. With a 6% drop in same-store sales in Q3 and a 10% drop in the number of transactions, Niccol says he’s going to focus on the customer experience, bringing back ceramic mugs for patrons who like to linger, and giving baristas back Sharpies to write on cups. “Was that a two-shot venti latte, Nicholas?”

Part of that plan is pulling the plug on stay-at-home workers. Niccol has issued a mandatory “Return to Office” order. Starting in January, corporate staff must come into the office at least three days a week. If they don’t, they’ll face consequences “up to, and including, separation,” according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News. Last month, Niccol told employees they should work wherever they need to to get the job done, but that that place was probably the office. Starbucks has about 3,500 corporate employees. Last year, dozens of Starbucks corporate employees signed an open letter protesting the company’s return-to-office mandate and its alleged union-busting. But Niccol is apparently having none of that. On the plus side, there will be no mandatory Tuesdays. Each team can pick its three days. No word on whether taking your laptop to a nearby Starbucks coffee shop counts as RTO.

The move is part of a broader RTO trend. Last month Amazon ordered employees back to the office five days a week; Dell has told employees who chose to work from home they wouldn’t be eligible for promotion; and Wall Street banks have been enforcing four-day-a-week policies. Kastle Systems, which runs those gates that office workers use to badge in, says office occupancy is still in the low 60% on most Tuesdays. New York City’s subways report that ridership is up on weekdays, to about 4.3 million paid riders, but still at only 75% of pre-pandemic levels.

Niccol has his own RTO issues. His $100 million-plus contract lets him remain living with his family in Newport Beach, California, and provides a corporate jet for him to make the 2,000-mile round trip to the Seattle HQ several times a week.

Meanwhile, the Chinese coffee chain that now outsells Starbucks in China, Luckin Coffee, is planning to enter the U.S. market next year, building out its supply chain and customizing its technology for the U.S., The Financial Times reports. Luckin was booted from the Nasdaq in 2000 after the SEC found it was cooking books as well as beans, and had fabricated $300 million in sales. Luckin claims 20,000 outlets in China, where Starbucks has just over 7,300.

What was Elon talking about with Vladimir Putin? NASA administrator Bill Nelson wants to know, and he’s called for a full-on investigation after The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Musk and Putin have been in regular contact since 2022. The Journal said the discussions had been confirmed by U.S., European, and Russian officials, and said they “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions between Putin and the world’s richest man.” The Journal reported that Putin asked Musk not to activate Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan “as a favor” to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. • The Washington Post discovered that while Musk was in the U.S. on a student visa in the 1990s, he was working illegally, and a major investor in Musk startup Zip2 told him to straighten out the visa issues. It’s not clear when Musk finally cleared up his immigration status. In a 2005 interview, Musk’s brother Kimball said the two were “illegal immigrants” when they started their company. • Just ahead of his appearance at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, where Musk pledged to cut $2 trillion in federal spending (about a third of FY 2024′s $6.75 trillion budget), he conceded his plan was gonna hurt: “We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said in a Town Hall on X. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.” • A Musk-funded PAC, Building America’s Future, is bankrolling fake Harris campaign ads that misstate the Veep’s position on issues including expanding free healthcare to undocumented immigrants, and Musk’s $1 million America super PAC giveaway has drawn a lawsuit from Philadelphia’s district attorney for violating election laws — it’s seen as paying people to register to vote. • Musk told a town hall on X last weekend that a Trump presidency would help him get SpaceX’s starships to Mars: “I feel more optimistic about it with a Trump White House than a non-Trump White House because the biggest impediment in progress that we’re experiencing is overregulation.” • Even as EV sales rose 2% in California, Tesla’s sales there fell 3.5% in Q3 and are down 12.6% for the first nine months of the year, according to the California New Car Dealers Association. It’s the third straight quarter of Tesla sales declines in America’s largest EV market. • As Musk seeks to raise billions to fund his own AI company, he attacked “woke” AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for their political correctness. “A lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they take on the philosophy of people around them,” Musk said at the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi government-backed conference in Riyadh. “So you have a woke, nihilistic—in my opinion—philosophy that is being built into these AIs.” • Employees at SpaceX, Tesla, and X are donating to Democrats at four times the rate they’re giving to GOP candidates. Semafor crunched the numbers: $410,000 in individual contributions to the Dems, and $99,400 to Republicans. Meanwhile, Musk has pumped $75 million into his Trump-supporting America super PAC. • The roller-coaster ride of Trump’s Truth Social and the continuing writedowns by investors in Musk’s X briefly made Truth Social the more valuable company, at about $10 billion versus X’s $9.4 billion on Tuesday, when shares of Truth parent Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. hit $55. By Thursday morning they’d plunged as low as $34, leaving it worth just $6.7 billion. • Musk says he’s not building a compound in Austin, Texas, for his 11 children and their three mothers, despite a well-sourced report in the New York Times that he’d acquired a 14,000-square-foot Tuscan villa and adjoining land there for former pop star Grimes, ex-Bloomberg employee Shivon Zilis, and his first wife, Justine.

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What’s a cable company to do to survive when everyone is cutting the cord? Sell off Rachel Maddow and the Real Housewives. That’s what Comcast’s chairman and CEO, Brian Roberts, plans to do with his company’s cable networks, as he tries to keep the media conglomerate and NBC parent ahead of the yield curve.

Comcast is considering spinning off its cable networks into a separate company, and partnering with other content producers on its streaming platforms, including Peacock. The move comes as the media businesses drove a jump in Q3 earnings.

“We’ve got a very strong hand,” Roberts’ deputy, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh, said on an earnings call. “There may be some smart things to do and we want to study that.”

Years of cord-cutting by cable subscribers have raised fears among cable owners that their lucrative franchises may eventually run dry. Comcast’s plan is to create a cable network company that would own such channels as MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, USA and Syfy. NBC’s broadcast network, the NBC Universal film studios and production unit, the Peacock streaming channel that hosts NBC’s productions, and the Universal theme parks unit would stay in the old Comcast. The new business would go to the existing shareholders in a stock swap.

Other media companies have been writing down the value of their cable businesses this year: Warner Brothers Discovery by $9.1 billion and Paramount by $6 billion. For most media companies the cable networks still remain profitable because of long-term carriage contracts with cable providers. But Comcast plays both ends of that stick, and its cable customers keep cutting that cord. Some 2.1 million cable customers opted out in the past 12 months, a 14.5% drop to 12.8 million subscribers. That helped send net income falling 10.3% in the third quarter from a year earlier, even as the Paris Olympics helped boost revenue 6.5% in the quarter to $32.1 billion.

• Spiritual Decline: As it waits to see whether it will finally tie the knot with Frontier Airlines, Spirit Airlines said it will furlough 330 pilots at the end of January, and downgrade 120 captains to first officer. It furloughed 186 pilots last month. It’s also selling 23 older Airbus planes for $519 million. A planned $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue collapsed amid antitrust scrutiny earlier this year, and Spirit shares are down 85% year-to-date. It’s facing a December deadline to refinance $1.1 billion in debt.
• Metamorphosis: Facebook parent Meta’s profits were up 35% in Q3 over the same period last year, but news that the company will keep spending heavily on AI sent its shares down 3% for the day. The total number of people using Meta’s apps each day rose 5% to 3.29 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called AI “a very, very large opportunity,” while speaking to investors and analysts on a call after the earnings announcement. “I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI-summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” Zuckerberg said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”
• Artificial Growth for Microsoft and Alphabet: AI is driving the growth of cloud computing services offered by Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft, with Microsoft cloud revenue up 22% in Q3 over last year, to $38.9 billion, with most of that from Azure, the corporate platform that grew 33%. Google’s cloud revenue for the quarter rose 34% to $11.3 billion. “AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow across every role, function, and business process,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. The news did little for share prices, though, as Azure predicted growth of only 31% to 32%, down a point or two. Microsoft shares fell 4% on the news. Google’s shares rose 3%.
• Bacterial Backlash? Not yet, says McDonald’s, and maybe never. The September Quarter Pounder E. coli outbreak in McDonald’s Midwest restaurants, which sickened dozens of people and left at least one dead, didn’t have a “material” effect on the burger empire’s earnings, CFO Ian Borden told investors on an earnings call Tuesday. But, he added, rebuilding the brand’s image of safety could be a challenge. If those two statements don’t seem to add up, that may be because the outbreak occurred just before the end of the third quarter, and since then, daily U.S. sales have fallen and fewer customers are visiting their local burger joint, Borden said. Analyst Jeff Farmer, with Gordon Haskett Research Advisors, said in a research note that foot traffic at McDonald’s in the United States was down 9.5% from last year’s levels at the end of last week, and states with the most E. coli cases had the biggest declines.
• Boeing’s Big Share Sale: As its 33,000 machinists continue their strike—now focused on securing the return of their old pensions—Boeing is running out of cash. The aerospace giant on Monday began raising $19 billion by issuing new stock, after reporting a $6.1 billion loss in the last quarter. With $58 billion in debt, and manufacturing at a standstill for its core passenger jet business, Boeing is facing the threat of a downgrade to junk on its $58 billion in outstanding debt. Boeing said in a regulatory filing that it planned to raise as much as $25 billion in stock and bond sales, and arrange a $10 billion credit facility with a consortium of banks. Boeing’s shares are down more than 40% this year.

• The Economy Is Looking Up: Consumer spending is up, and new unemployment claims are down to their lowest level since May, showcasing a strong economy ahead of next week’s election. The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits fell to a five-month low last week and consumer spending grew by more than expected in September. Inflation is trending downward and labor costs posted their smallest gain in more than three years, according to a trove of government data released Thursday. That keeps the Fed on track to cut interest rates next week and again in December, Ryan Sweet, chief economist at Oxford Economics, told Reuters.
• All That Glitters Is Gold: Fears of global disruption with war in Ukraine and the Middle East and a possible conflict over Taiwan have pushed the price of gold up 35% this year, to more than $2,700 an ounce. But some of that demand may be coming from that old FOMO, fear of missing out, the World Gold Council said.
• Tidal Waves Goodbye? Jack Dorsey’s music-streaming service Tidal is laying off about 100 people, ditching its entire marketing and product management departments to focus on engineering, which might also be shrunk over the next few weeks. In a note to staff seen by Fortune, Dorsey wrote that Tidal needs to operate “like a startup again,” with each department operating with a “much smaller team.” Tidal, which promises higher fidelity than rival streaming services, has struggled to attract users in the face of competition from industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music.
• Way Mo’ Money: Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, has raised $5.6 billion from investors to grow its fleet of autonomous taxis and expand into new cities. Waymo’s taxis are giving 100,000 rides a week in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and will be serving Austin and Atlanta by 2025 in a partnership with Uber. Waymo is planning to use Hyundai cars and has started testing an autonomous vehicle made by China’s Zeekr.

The Washington Post has lost at least 250,000 subscribers since announcing last Friday that it would not endorse a candidate for president — roughly 10 percent of its digital following, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Post would not officially confirm that figure, saying it was a private company, but it was reported in a story in the newspaper that cited documents and two unnamed sources who were familiar with the figures. Another non-endorsement last week has caused thousands of Los Angeles Times readers to cancel subscriptions, although not nearly at the Post's level.

One journalism historian, Jon Marshall at Northwestern University, said he had a hard time recalling a comparable response, although a boycott of the Arkansas Gazette when it supported the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957 cost that newspaper more than $20 million in today's dollars.

The Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, said presidential endorsements create a perception of bias at the newspaper while having little real influence on how readers vote. His said his only regret was making the decision known when passions are heated so close to Election Day; the paper's editorial staff had reportedly prepared an endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris.

“A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper,” the Post's media critic, Erik Wemple, wrote. “Few will forget about the decision not to publish it.”

The Post's executive editor, Matt Murray, told employees in a staff meeting that there were “several positive days” of new subscribers signing up, although he didn't mention any numbers, the newspaper reported.

Some of the Post's angry digital readers have also already paid for a year's access, and will retain that until their subscriptions expire.

“After another month or so, the election will have ended, and there may be people who say that ‘I need the Post more than they need me’ and come back," said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

The Post also saw a big increase in subscribers during Donald Trump's presidency from people attracted to the newspaper's aggressive coverage, raising the possibility of a repeat if the man that the newspaper wasn't prepared to endorse is returned to office.

In the meantime, Edmonds said, “it's very bad.” After losing readers during the Biden administration, the Post had reportedly seen positive signs of growth — until this week.

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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.