In the first blush of their relationship, The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos seemed like an excellent match. Here was a paper with a strong pedigree that had fallen on somewhat hard times, and a suitor with funds who seemed eager to return it to steady glory. In 2013 Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million from the Graham family and promised a 'golden era' to come. I had left the Post by then but was happy for my former colleagues. When Donald Trump took office a few years later, it was a relief to know that a journalistic institution with a record of holding White House misdeeds to account was still close by. Yesterday, in a dismal morning Zoom call, the Post's executive editor, Matt Murray, announced that they were laying off one-third of its already diminished staff. The follow-up email had the tone of robotic obfuscation that any decent editor would have rewritten. ('Following up on today's communication, I'm writing to share the difficult news that your position is...
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