This is The Guardian.

Today, a reckoning for American media as Jeff Bezos guts the Washington Post.

I grew up with a post.

My parents got the print copy delivered to our house every morning.

There used to be a section called The Kids Post, which is partly how I learned how to read.

And I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was pretty young, maybe like 11, 12, and wanted to be a

foreign correspondent in particular. And The Washington Post was always the dream destination to do that.

Claire Parker is the Cairo Bureau Chief of the Washington Post. She's reported on the Israel-Gaza

war and covered the Middle East for the last couple of years. She had spent weeks organizing a reporting trip to Yemen when an order came from above.

All travel had to be cancelled.

In the middle of the afternoon, we were called to a company-wide webinar, which we were not

allowed to ask questions or to offer comments or feedback. The editor-in-chief

told us that dramatic cuts were coming. The head of human resources then told us that we would

each receive an email that either said our job is eliminated or not affected by these changes.

An email.

Telling journalists who'd spend years, entire careers with The Post, whether they were in or out.

The way that most of us think about journalism and the value of journalism is as a public good and as an essential accountability mechanism

for democracy around the world. And it was just this sort of dramatic moment for a lot of us

of realizing that the people now heading the company and the owner Jeff Bezos seemed to have

given up on this idea. Around 30 minutes after the company-wide meeting ended, Claire's email came through.

She'd gone out to her balcony and was looking down at the streets of Cairo when it was

confirmed. Her job was eliminated. And it was just perfunctory. It was, you know, this very sort of bureaucratic

...