I’ve read the Washington Post for most of my life. While growing up in the Maryland suburbs when my father worked in Washington, D.C., WaPo was a fixture on our kitchen table, and over meals we regularly talked about articles or news that we’d read that day.
For me, the paper was also an inspiration growing up. As a budding photographer, especially through high school, I would study the images taken by the photojournalists and learned a lot simply through studying their composition and viewpoints even without knowing their camera settings or having the quality equipment they did. My professional photography career was definitely influenced by their many Pulitzer Prize-winning staff members.
Therefore, it was so disheartening to learn that today Bezos fired nearly 1/3 of the WaPo staff, including all of the staff photographers—while concurrently, he spent millions of dollars promoting the Melania documentary that Amazon funded.
I was conflicted throughout the day and into the night as I considered how to react. On the one hand, I subscribe to three daily newspapers to keep abreast of the news and read different viewpoints while supporting the journalists and photojournalists who continue on in the business. However, when Bezos purchased WaPo, I wondered how that would change the freedom of their reporting. Now I know.
Over the months, I kept paying my dues each month, but today was the final straw. I canceled my subscription. I’m one small subscriber, but I imagine there are many others like me who clicked that cancel button today.
It’s a sad day in journalism when one of the richest men in the world chooses and has the power to change the narrative of one of the country’s flagship newspapers from reporting the news to becoming a PR machine.
As the the National Press Photographers Association said: “Every time a photojournalist and picture editor is laid off in our profession, it is one less set of eyes to document a reality that often challenges official narratives. And we grieve with all of our members who have seen their staff positions upended over the years. To have this happen in our nation’s capital, at a critical time when accountability has never been more important, is deeply troubling. Our association is committed to supporting independent visual journalists, and we will continue to do so as the news business model continues to struggle through economic crisis.”