His shameful stewardship of a once great title highlights how much we lose when private interest eclipses the public good<\/p>\n
Not long after being made Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year<\/a> in 1999, Jeff Bezos told me<\/a>: \u201cThey were not choosing me as much as they were choosing the internet, and me as a symbol.\u201d A quarter of an increasingly dark century later, the Amazon founder is now a symbol of something else: how the ultra-rich can kill the news.<\/p>\n Job cuts in an industry that has struggled financially since the internet came into existence and killed its business model is hardly new, but last week\u2019s brutal cull<\/a> of hundreds of journalists at the Bezos-owned Washington Post marks a new low. The redundancies that were announced to staff on a video call, the axing of half its foreign bureau (including the war reporter in Ukraine) \u2013 not since P&O Ferries<\/a> have layoffs been handled so badly. Former Post stalwart Paul Farhi<\/a> described a decision<\/a> that affected nearly half of the 790-strong workforce as \u201cthe biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" His shameful stewardship of a once great title highlights how much we lose when private interest eclipses the public good Not long after being made Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year in 1999, Jeff Bezos told me: \u201cThey were not choosing me as much as they were choosing the internet, and me as a symbol.\u201d … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}