Washington Post scrapped ‘We the People’ campaign after MS NOW used same tagline: report

The Washington Post was reportedly set to unveil a new marketing campaign tied to the United States Constitution last year until the paper’s leaders encountered a significant issue: the tagline was already taken. 

The Post planned to launch a campaign aimed at conveying its connection to America with the tagline, "We the People," according to Semafor. But before the newspaper debuted the new ads, MS NOW went to air with the exact same idea. 

MSNBC officially changed its name to "My Source News Opinion World," or MS NOW, on Nov. 15 as part of a rebranding after Comcast spun off its cable assets into a new company named Versant. The new company launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign including the tagline "We the People." 

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"MS NOW’s campaign and its massive budget forced the Post to put its campaign on ice," Semafor reported. 

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The botched tagline report attempt came one day after Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis announced he would step aside amid widespread backlash to the way he handled mass layoffs at the company. 

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Lewis drew intense backlash for being absent as Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray was tasked to announce sweeping layoffs Wednesday that affected a third of all employees. Lewis further inflamed backlash against him following the layoffs after he was spotted at a pre-Super Bowl event Thursday in San Francisco.  

"After two years of transformation at The Washington Post, now is the right time for me to step aside," Lewis said in a memo to staff Saturday. "During my tenure, difficult decisions have been taken in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post so it can for many years ahead publish high-quality nonpartisan news to millions of customers each day."

While the "We the People" tagline debacle is merely a blip when it comes to Lewis’ widely panned tenure at the Post, Semafor noted that it highlights the paper’s "inability to think creatively."

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"The paper’s new tagline was so unoriginal that another politics-focused news media company needing to rebrand had the same idea, but executed faster with more money," Semafor wrote. 

In an interview with Fox News Digital before Lewis stepped aside, Murray defended the way layoffs were handled. 

"Will has been engaged with me very closely on this for a long time," Murray said of Lewis. "And there were a lot of things that the company did and Will was engaged with all across the company, and I wasn't. He had a lot of things to tend to today."

Fox News Digital’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.