How Jeff Bezos ruined the Washington Post and why he should sell it
The first time I spoke to Jeff Bezos , he had founded Amazon as an online bookstore and made himself available to all kinds of journalists — a "political genius," said the New York Times Magazine, a "brilliant, charming, hyper, and misleadingly goofy mastermind." In 1999, having blown past the naysayers who scoffed at the strange notion of online retailing, the 35-year-old businessman was named Time’s Person of the Year. Nearly a decade-and-a-half later, as one of the world’s richest men, Bezos spent $250 million of his personal fortune to buy the Washington Post from Katharine Graham’s family. And now he should fold his cards and sell it. It’s a different era for the industry and a very different Bezos, one who is comfortable slashing a third of the paper’s staff. EX-WASHINGTON POST FACT CHECKER HITS ‘ABSENTEE OWNER’ BEZOS, TELLS HIM TO COMMIT TO SAVING PAPER OR SELL IT Having initially declared that "the duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owner...