Has a Bezos Protuberance Knocked WaPo for a Loop?
January 12, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I thought the Washington Post was owned by one of the world’s richest me with a giant rocket ship and a really big yacht with huge protuberances. I probably am wrong, but what’s new? I found the information in “Washington Post Newsroom Is Rattled by Buyouts” in line with other organizations layoffs, terminations, RIFs, whatever. My goodness, how could an outfit with some Bezos magic be cutting costs. I think that protuberance obsessed fellow just pumped big money into an artificial intelligence start up. To fund that, it makes sense to me in today’s business environment to accept cost cutting and wild and crazy investments in relatively unproven technology amusing. No, it is not interesting.
An aspiring journalist at a university’s whose president quit because it was easier to invent and recycle information look at the closed library. The question is a good one, even if the young journalist cannot spell. Thanks, MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Three tries. Bingo.
The write up in Vanity Fair, which is a business magazine like Harvard University’s Harvard Business Review without the allegations of plagiarism and screwy diversity battles, brings up images of would-be influencers clutching their giant metal and custom ceramic mugs and gripping their mobile phones with fear in their eyes. Imagine. A newspaper with staff cuts. News!
The article points out:
Scaling back staff while heading into a pivotal presidential election year seems like an especially ill-timed move given the _Post_’s traditional strengths in national politics and policy. Senior editors at the _Post_ have been banking on heightened interest in the election to juice readership amid slowed traffic and subscriptions. At one point in the meeting, according to two staffers, investigative reporter Carol Leonnig said that over the years she’d been told that the National team was doing great work and that issues on the business side would be taken care of, only for the problems to persist.
The write up states:
In late December, word of who’d taken a buyout at _The_ _Washington Post_ began to trickle out. Reporters found themselves especially alarmed by the hard cost cutting hit taken by one particular department: news research, a unit that assists investigations by, among other things, tracking down subjects, finding court records, verifying claims, and scouring documents. The department’s three most senior researchers—Magda Jean-Louis and Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Crites and Jennifer Jenkins—had all accepted buyouts, among the 240 that the company offered employees across departments amid financial struggles. That left news research with only three people: supervisor Monika Mathur and researchers Cate Brown, who specializes in international research, and Razzan Nakhlawi.
The “real news” is that research librarians are bailing out before a day of reckoning which could nuke pensions and other benefits. Researchers are quite intelligent people in my opinion.
Do these actions reflect on Mr. Bezos, he of the protuberance fixation, and his management methods? Amazon has a handful of challenges. The oddly shaped Bezos rocket ship has on occasion exploded. And now the gem of DC journalism is losing people. I would suggest that management methods have a role to play.
Killing off support for corporate libraries is not a new thing. The Penn Central outfit was among the first big corporate giant to decide its executives could live without a special library. Many other firms have followed in the last 15 years or so. Now the Special Library Association is a shadow of its former self, trampled by expert researchers skilled in the use of the Google and by hoards of self-certified individuals who proclaim themselves open source information experts. Why wouldn’t an outfit focused on accurate information dump professional writers and researchers? It meshes quite well with alternative facts, fake news, and AI-generated content. Good enough is the mantra of the modern organization. How much cereal is in your kids’ breakfast box when you first open it? A box half full. Good enough.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2024
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