Matt Wolfbridge (read Typebar Magazine)

Unbelievable

Obviously small news outlets need money to get going, and the ones we have now can't replace newspapers, but they also cost a lot less once you take out all the inflated exec and "star" salaries, expensive real estate, dumb tech brained gambits, and, most importantly, infinite profit motive!

If you are a WaPost journalist who lost your job today and want a comped annual subscription to Typebar let me know (matt @ typebarmagazine dot com)

I'm sorry I can't offer you a full-time job because you deserve that and more.

i'm so sorry, will.

We can have lives worth living or we can have billionaires.

Please don't report this as a straightforward business story; it's a story about coercive social transformation being imposed by people so rich they've ceased to see the rest of us as legitimate stakeholders in our own lives

Bezos isn't destroying the Washington Post because it isn't profitable. He's destroying the Washington Post because he's calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests

Devastation of alt-weeklies by VC capital has only made this problem more apparent but the news should employ more barely functional alcoholic townies and fewer striving nerds.

Copper theft is making small radio stations go silent. “They destroyed a whole outlet for a few hundred dollars.”

“They destroyed a whole outlet for a few hundred dollars.”

Copper wire robbery is increasingly a concern for small radio stations. www.cjr.org/news/copper-...

More.

the $75 million Jeff Bezos set on fire for that Melania propaganda piece could have funded most independent newsrooms for literally decades

To be clear: a zoom call with the employee’s webcams disabled so they didn’t have to see any of their faces while they laid them off.

The cycle from Amazon killing bookstores to Bezos axing the books section of the Post is something

Team resources is why worker-owned media collectives are so important. It's not gonna fix everything, especially the problem of readers only having so much cash, but everyone can't go it alone.

killing off a major source of books coverage goes really well next to Amazon/Goodreads on Bezos' resume for being the single most destructive individual for American literary culture in our history

"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years

there are obviously a million of these every day but: it should be an administration-ending scandal that they're all referring to ICE agents being "in theater" in Minneapolis. They are literally talking about being at war with the civilians of an American city

The Post killing its Books section (one of the best around) is so fucking bleak

all the creators in the world will never fill the hole created by the degradation and loss of media institutions, despite all their problems

If you ever want to feel like you live in “the ruins of a once great civilization,” then read a local daily paper from the middle of last century — our predecessors had more and better knowledge of their neighbors, their societies, and their local democracies than we do about our own.

What are the odds Epstein is Satoshi?

Writing for the Post was one of my proudest accomplishments, and now the whole institution is fading away. As a journalist, as a reader, it's unbearably sad.

It's genuinely kind of funny that the ALL-AMERICAN MAGA HALFTIME SHOW is going to have the guy who sang this as its headliner right in the middle of all the Epstein stuff

Bezos essentially wanting to make sure his propaganda rag runs as cheaply as possible. If you’ve given up on having a legitimate paper why bother with anything other than regime agitprop?

You don’t get rid of books and sports on the same day if your plan is growing legitimate readership.

These are avenues that still get lots of interest. I was able to start a book-centric magazine that got popular pretty quickly because there’s so much interest in books!!

To call this a tragedy is an understatement. I remember when there was excitement around the post so many years ago.

You can’t do what he’s doing and expect there to be an actual audience of real readers subscribing to your paper.

The Washington post now exists for bezos to show Trump admin officials curated regime propaganda in exchange for favorable treatment of his exploitative businesses.

Pay Christopher Sloce using PayPal.Me Go to paypal.me/ChristopherSloce and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.

I'm also going to post my venmo/PayPal info. I don't love doing this. I feel embarrassed, but I also can't control missing a week of work. Venmo is chris-sloce.

www.paypal.me/ChristopherS...