While you are enjoying George H.W. Bush’s putdowns of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, George W., pause for a moment and consider his vicious characterization of Northeastern’s Michael Dukakis, one of our great public citizens, as a “midget nerd.”
No, I don’t necessarily expect a 91-year-old to know that “the M-word” is considered offensive to people in the dwarfism community. But one of the reasons it’s offensive is that it’s nearly always used to demean and degrade someone. (Dukakis, obviously, is not a dwarf; he is merely on the short side of average.)
The elder Bush has his good qualities, but he could be a nasty piece of work. You may recall that his late henchman, Lee Atwater, issued a deathbed apology for the “naked cruelty” and racism of Bush’s campaign against Dukakis in 1988, in which Atwater said he “would strip the bark off the little bastard.” Somehow I doubt Bush is going to say he’s sorry.
Stat’s top editors, from left, are Stephanie Simon, managing editor for news; Rick Berke, executive editor; and Gideon Gil, managing editor for enterprise and partnerships. Photo by Dan Kennedy.
Nearly three weeks ago The Boston Globe said goodbye to about 40 full- and part-time staff members as the paper’s executives struggle to keep up with declining revenues and a shrinking ad market.
Today a sister project, Stat, makes its bright and shiny debut. The site covers medicine, health and life sciences with a staff of nearly 40 journalists recruited from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post as well as smaller news organizations. There are another 10 or so employees on the business side.
The two developments shouldn’t be linked except for the timing, according to Stat’s editors. The Globe isn’t being cut in order to fund Stat. Rather, Globe owner John Henry’s decision to launch an ambitious new project shows that he’s willing to experiment with new models of journalism even as the newspaper business contracts. (Henry explains his reasoning in a letter to readers.)
“I see great potential in what we’re doing for the Globe,” says Stat executive editor Rick Berke, a former top editor with The New York Times and, more recently, Politico. “If we can have a sustainable business model here and pull in revenues, that could ultimately help the whole Globe Media organization across the board.”
Adds Gideon Gil, a longtime Globe editor who is now Stat’s managing editor for enterprise and partnerships: “I’m sad about people losing their jobs in the Globe newsroom. Some are longtime colleagues of mine. I feel fortunate that I’m working at Stat, because we have great ambition and a vision to really cover this area. I understand why you and others try to make a connection between them, but we’re separate businesses. We each have our own business plans and have to succeed on our own.”
Stat’s website formally debuted at midnight today, though since August the staff has been producing stories that have run in the Globe. On Tuesday afternoon, the atmosphere in Stat’s interconnected newsrooms on the third floor of the Globe’s Dorchester headquarters was busy but surprisingly non-chaotic given that the launch was less than 10 hours away.
Berke, Gil and Stephanie Simon, another former Politico editor who is the site’s managing editor for news, checked out a promotional video that was near completion. Afterward, the four of us gathered in Berke’s office, dominated by a large, heavily used whiteboard. A bottle of champagne stood unopened on his desk; a gray Stat fleece hung from a hook on his door.
The business model is clearly the most important question facing Stat. If you look at other, smaller verticals the Globe has launched — Crux, which covers the Catholic Church, and BetaBoston, which follows the local innovation economy — you find quality journalism but just a smattering of ads. Indeed, free, advertiser-supported websites are currently out of favor in some circles, since it is thought that you need scale on the order of megasites like The Huffington Post or BuzzFeed to make money.
Gil, though, offers some intriguing ideas. For one thing, he says, Stat is being launched as a free website in part so that its audience can become familiar with the content and so that the staff can collect data on what’s working and what isn’t. Later, he says, Stat will start charging for some of the site’s more specialized content. In addition, a print component — perhaps a monthly or every-other-month magazine — is being considered as a way of reaching a different audience and appealing to print advertisers. (Stat’s chief revenue officer, Angus Macaulay, expands on those ideas in this article by Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab.)
As for who comprises Stat’s potential audience, Simon has an optimistic answer: pretty much everyone. “We’re looking for ordinary readers who are interested in anything related to health or medicine,” she says. “And we’re for professionals, too. It’s not at all a trade publication or a niche publication. It’s really meant to appeal to a broad audience.”
The lead article in Stat right now — as well as the top story in today’s Globe — is an investigation by Ike Swetlitz into a dubious vitamin company promoted by Donald Trump that later failed. Another feature, by Bob Tedeschi, focuses on the emotional toll for cancer patients who are repeatedly brought back from the brink of death through the use of cutting-edge targeted therapies. Coverage ranges from local to national; Stat has three reporters in Washington and one each in New York and San Francisco, and there are plans for international outposts as well. There’s a daily 6 a.m. email newsletter by Megan Thielking called “Morning Rounds” and a number of other regular features, the full panoply of which is described in this press release.
The site itself is mobile-first, which Gil says is a necessity given that people increasingly do most of their reading on their phones. “People spend so much time focused on what their home page looks like on a desktop,” he says. “And fewer and fewer people actually go to the home page.” As a result, Stat is attractive but a bit random on a desktop computer or a phone. And reading it horizontally on my iPad, which is how I consume a lot of news, is a fairly miserable experience, as tiny rows of type stretch from one margin to the other.
There’s also a lot of video, the better to share on social media — indeed, the editors say about a quarter of the staff consists of multimedia producers.
Unlike Crux or BetaBoston (but like Boston.com), Stat is a separate entity within Boston Globe Media Partners and is more or less independent from the Globe, though the Globe is free to run Stat stories and vice-versa. There are also joint meetings and shared story budgets. In his letter to readers, John Henry writes that he and other Globe executives believe that “a news organization can be most nimble when it is built organically for the digital age.”
At its heart, Stat isn’t really an experiment in providing quality journalism. A large, talented, experienced staff shouldn’t have any trouble doing that. Rather, it’s an experiment in finding a way out of the crisis facing professional news organizations — a crisis defined by the technology-fueled collapse of revenue sources.
“My dream,” says Berke, “is not only to deliver head-turning journalism that you can’t find anywhere else but to find a sustainable business model. And my dream would be to prove that people will pay for important, vital, ambitious journalism.”
Stat, a long-in-the-making website covering health and life sciences, debuts today. The site, which employs nearly 40 journalists, is part of The Boston Globe’s media properties and is based mainly at the paper’s headquarters at 135 Morrissey Blvd.
The news was embargoed until midnight.
On Tuesday afternoon I had a chance to interview Stat’s executive editor, Rick Berke, and two of his top deputies. Look for my report around mid-morning Wednesday at WGBHNews.org. Below is a press release from Boston Globe Media Partners.
John Henry and Rick Berke Launch Stat
A Publication Dedicated to Health, Medicine and Life Sciences
November 4, 2015 — Boston — John W. Henry, owner of The Boston Globe and principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, and longtime reporter and editor Rick Berke today launched Stat, a national publication reporting from the frontiers of health, medicine and life sciences. The publication has assembled a news team of nearly 40 top journalists, as well as an engineering team, an advertising team, and a marketing team.
Delivering fast, deep and tough-minded journalism, Stat will take readers inside science labs and hospitals, biotech boardrooms and political backrooms. It will publish breaking news, richly reported feature stories, investigative projects and multimedia presentations throughout the day at Statnews.com.
“Over the next 20 years, some of the most important stories in the world are going to emerge in the life sciences arena. Stat has a tremendous opportunity to uncover vital issues that touch the lives of every human being,” Henry said. “We realized that there was no one doing what we aim to do: be the country’s go-to news source for the life sciences.”
Stat is headquartered in Boston, with additional reporters in New York, San Francisco and Washington, and more to follow in other cities around the world.
“I’m grateful to have the opportunity to hire dozens of the most talented reporters, writers and multimedia phenoms in the country to join our quest to create a news site with stories you won’t find anywhere else,” said Berke, a former assistant managing editor at The New York Times and executive editor at Politico. “We will take readers behind the scenes of the worlds of science and medicine and introduce them to patients and personalities who are driving a revolution in human health.”
Stat reporters have wasted no time breaking news even before today’s launch. Initial stories, published through its sister publication, The Boston Globe, included an exclusive on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders rejecting a campaign donation from price-hiking pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli; a scoop on President Obama’s nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration pulling his name off several scientific papers that were critical of the agency; a fascinating deep dive into clinical trials in the age of social media; and an important examination of the shortcomings of precision medicine. Stat has also launched a fast-paced email newsletter, “Morning Rounds,” which has quickly become a must-read.
The Stat editing team is led by three accomplished journalists: The managing editor for news, Stephanie Simon, has been a national reporter for The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, most recently, Politico. The managing editor for enterprise, Gideon Gil, was the Boston Globe’s health and science editor. Jason Ukman, the senior news editor, was an editor at the Washington Post for 14 years. Gil and Ukman played important roles in editing Pulitzer Prize-winning stories for their organizations.
Stat has developed a sleek website with an emphasis on its mobile version. It has also built out an extensive multimedia unit including animators, a data visualization editor and videographers. Led by New York Times veterans Jeffery DelViscio and Matthew Orr, the team will bring stories to visual life, creating everything from short, social-media-focused video explainers to mini-documentaries to interactive reader experiences.
A strong lineup of regular features is also in the works:
Carl Zimmer, Stat national correspondent and a New York Times columnist, will host a monthly video feature called “Science Happens” that will take viewers inside laboratories conducting cutting-edge biomedical research.
Veteran pharmaceutical industry reporter Ed Silverman will revive his blog Pharmalot, last at The Wall Street Journal, and will write a weekly column.
Sharon Begley, a nationally renowned science writer and formerly an editor at Newsweek, will puncture myths and question conventional wisdom in her column “Gut Check.”
Stat will conduct monthly nationwide polling on health and medicine issues in partnership with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In a new biweekly podcast, “Signal,” leading biotech reporters Meg Tirrell of CNBC and Luke Timmerman of the Timmerman Report will deliver a high-energy mix of news analysis, feature stories and interviews with movers and shakers in the biotech industry.
A section called “First Opinion,” overseen by Patrick Skerrett, previously executive editor for Harvard Health Publications, will feature science, medical and financial experts weighing in on the news of the day.
Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, of the popular site “Retraction Watch,” will write “The Watchdogs,” focusing on issues of misconduct, fraud and scientific integrity.
In addition, the reporting staff includes former Politico reporter David Nather, a health policy expert who will lead the Stat Washington bureau; Helen Branswell, a renowned global health reporter who comes from The Canadian Press; enterprise reporter David Armstrong, who covered health care on the projects team for Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal; senior writer Bob Tedeschi, a longtime New York Times columnist who will write about patients and clinicians; Charles Piller, an award-winning investigative reporter for The Sacramento Bee and The Los Angeles Times; and Seth Mnookin, a contributing writer and prominent author.
Other editors include Elie Dolgin, PhD in evolutionary genetics who was previously an associate editor at The Scientist and senior news editor at Nature Medicine; Lisa Raffensperger, a former web editor at Discover Magazine; and Tony Fong, previously a senior editor at GenomeWeb.
Chief Revenue Officer Angus Macaulay, a veteran executive of publishing companies including Rodale, Hearst Magazines and Time, Inc., leads the business team. Michele Staats, the former head of integrated marketing at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the marketing director at Stat. Peter Bless, a 16-year veteran of scientific and healthcare advertising, is sales director.
On Thursday night I had a chance to see an advance screening of “Spotlight,” sponsored by Northeastern’s School of Journalism and the College of Arts, Media and Design. And I was blown away. How often does a movie for which you have high expectations actually live up to them?
As soon as it was over, Northeastern’s Barry Bluestone said something that I was thinking: this is “All the President’s Men” for a new generation. It is at least as good a piece of filmmaking. And it underscores the vital role that journalism plays in hold powerful institutions to account — in this case the Catholic Church, which at one time was the most powerful Boston institution of all.
After the film, five of the Globe journalists portrayed in the film — Walter Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer and Ben Bradlee Jr. — stuck around for a brief discussion. (By the way, I know Robinson fairly well, and Michael Keaton is scary-good at capturing his demeanor.) Two of them, Robinson and Carroll, are Northeastern graduates. Robinson also worked as a journalism professor at Northeastern for seven years before returning to the Globe in 2014.
Congratulations to everyone involved in “Spotlight.” I hope it helps the public understand why the work that great journalists do matters to all of us.
For Republican politicians, whining about the media comes as naturally as invoking misty memories of Ronald Reagan. It’s a sure-fire applause line, as complaints about the liberal press play into the right’s extravagant sense of victimhood. And there are occasions when those complaints are actually on the mark.
Wednesday night’s presidential debate was one of those occasions. The CNBC panelists turned in a performance that I’m sure was intended as an aggressive attempt to hold the Republican candidates to account. It came off instead as sneering and disrespectful in tone, petty and irrelevant in substance.
Asked about the compromise on the debt limit that Congress seems likely to approve, Ted Cruz responded with a devastatingly accurate summary of the proceedings that had unfolded up to that point.
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said as the audience applauded (exact quotes based on a transcript published by The Washington Post). “This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions — ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”
In case you missed the debate, let me assure you that Cruz was not exaggerating. Those were actual questions asked by debate panelists Carl Quintanilla, John Harwood and Becky Quick. Several other CNBC hosts popped up in cameos, with the unhinged stock-market cheerleader Jim Cramer and the original Tea Party instigator Rick Santelli competing to see who could yell louder.
“All of the highlights — ALL of them — will be about candidates slamming the terrible questions and conduct of debate,” tweeted conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt afterwards.
On CNN, Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus seethed with righteous indignation when Dana Bash stuck a microphone in his face. “I’m very disappointed in the moderators, and I’m very disappointed in CNBC,” he said. Bash and Anderson Cooper, who was on the anchor desk, agreed that they’d never seen anything quite like Priebus’ pique. “For him to come out and bash the network, I was pretty surprised,” said Bash.
If there was a takeaway worth noting other than CNBC’s conduct, it involves who might have actually won the encounter. Count me among those who believed the most important contest was between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the theory being that one of them is likely to emerge as the nominee after the novelty candidacies of Donald Trump and Ben Carson fade.
And yes, there was a clear winner. That’s Rubio you see bouncing around the ring, fists in the air, while Bush is lying unconscious on the canvas with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. With his campaign fading and his continued viability on the line, Bush delivered what may have been the worst in a series of uninspiring debate performances, although I would have no problem letting him make my fantasy-football picks for me. (He’s 7-0!)
Rubio, meanwhile, was crisp, focused and able to turn aside tough questions without quite answering them, as he did with one from Harwood about the Tax Foundation’s criticism of his tax plan.
Rubio skillfully went after the media as well. When Quintanilla asked him about an editorial in the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suggesting that he resign for missing too many Senate votes, Rubio responded that the paper had endorsed Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Barack Obama despite their having compiled similar records. “This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservative movement,” Rubio said. Later, after Trump denounced Super PACs (with no follow-up from the intrepid panelists about Trump’s recent close encounter with a Super PAC), Rubio interjected, “The Democrats have the ultimate Super PAC — it’s called the mainstream media.”
But Bush versus Rubio was the undercard. The main event matched Trump against Carson. According to the most recent New York Times-CBS News poll, Carson now leads Trump nationally for the first time, with a margin of 26 percent to 22 percent. Everyone else is in single-digit territory.
So how did they do? I’m not in a good position to judge. I have no patience for Trump’s arrogant anger about Mexican immigrants or for Carson’s soft-spoken absurdities about the Holocaust. For what it’s worth, social-media analyst Dan Diamond tweeted that Carson led the field after the debate by gaining 6,200 new followers on Twitter (he has 838,000 overall). Coming in second was Rubio with 4,200 (924,000 overall) and Trump third with 3,500 (4.7 million). We’ll probably have to wait a day or two for a more scientific poll.
The story that’s likely to linger, though, is CNBC’s conduct. Two generations ago, Spiro Agnew denounced the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” thus helping to define the conservative case against the media. On Wednesday night, Carl Quintanilla and company turned in a performance that will be remembered by the media’s conservative critics for a long time to come.
Tech journalist Om Malik interviews Jack Dorsey in 2013. Photo (cc) by JD Lasica.
Twitter, long a laggard behind Facebook, may be reaching a crisis point. Despite the return of co-founder Jack Dorsey, the stock price is sliding, its user base is stagnant and journalists — many of whom have long been enamored of Twitter because of its flexibility — are beginning to realize that far more of their audience is on Facebook.
Recently Umair Haque wrote a post for Medium headlined “Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)” in which he argued that the platform has become the leading outlet for a certain type of nasty incivility — a place where “little violences that permeate the social web” get their more extravagant airing.
The post degenerates into overwrought handwringing. But before Haque gets to the part where he starts critiquing the meaning of life, he raises some important questions about Twitter. Why is Facebook (usually) a more civil place that fosters better conversations than Twitter?
Some of the answers seem obvious. On Facebook, you’re not bound by the 140-character restriction, which makes it more congenial for a conversation to develop. Facebook also makes it easier (though not as easy as it should) to define your community, whereas Twitter assumes you want everything to be open to everyone. Yes, you can fiddle with the settings, but it makes the service feel less useful.
A couple of years ago, I vastly preferred Twitter to Facebook. Now I find Facebook to be much more satisfying. I’m not sure whether Twitter has changed or if, instead, what I’m looking for in a social platform has evolved. Maybe it’s just that the novelty of Twitter has worn off.
Twitter recently unveiled curated stories called Moments, which might help in attracting those who were put off by the sheer labor you have to put into assembling a worthwhile list of feeds. If users started thinking about it differently — say, as more of a broadcast medium, a more flexible form of RSS, rather than as a place to have a conversation — that might help, too.
Or Twitter might curl up and die. Technologies come and go. There is no guarantee that Twitter will be one of the survivors, or that it should be.
The trouble with apps. Like many newspapers, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post have bet the farm on online distribution. Each has tablet apps (the Post has two!) that create a reading experience somewhat similar to the print newspaper. As a regular reader of both papers, I want to point out a bug in each. (Caveat: I could be doing something wrong.)
First, the Globe app, which is based upon a replica of the print edition, has a feature that supposedly lets you share an article on Twitter or Facebook. But the link it produces does not take you to the article. Instead, it takes you to the App Store, where you are invited to download the Globe’s iPad app. Which, of course, you already have.
The app, designed by miLibris, has improved greatly since a buggy version was released some months back. But this particular bug has prevailed. Time to fix it, eh?
My issue with The Washington Post involves its “classic” app, which is older than the sexy new magazine-like app that’s included with Amazon Prime — but which is also more comprehensive. (An overview of the Post’s various digital products can be found here.) It’s simple: the audio in videos does not play on my iPad, even though they are preceded by video ads that work just fine. The same videos also work fine when I try them on the newer app.
I would love to know whether the Globe and the Post are going to fix the bugs I’ve described — or if, as is always possible, I’m doing something boneheaded to create problems that don’t actually exist.
In other Boston Globe-related news, staff reporter Callum Borchers is leaving the paper to take a job at The Washington Post. According to the official announcement, Borchers “will join The Fix to launch a new beat exploring the intersection of politics and the media.”
Cal earned a master’s degree in journalism at Northeastern a few years ago, and I was lucky enough that he took a class with me. He’s done terrific work at the Globe, and I wish him all the best.
Doug Most, The Boston Globe’s deputy managing editor for special sections and new initiatives, is moving to a job in the front office, where he will be director of growth initiatives.
According to a memo to the staff by Globe editor Brian McGrory, Most will work on projects ranging from special sections to seeking sponsorships and helping with the paper’s native-advertising efforts. He’ll work alongside CEO Mike Sheehan and chief growth officer Tim Marken.
Given the recent round of buyouts and layoffs, it’s clear that the Globe’s efforts to stem the revenue decline have been insufficient, as they have been across the newspaper business as a whole. So best wishes to Most. He’s got his work cut out for him.
The full text of McGrory’s memo follows:
Mike Sheehan called me a few weeks ago with a rather direct request: Give me Doug Most.
It made an unusual amount of sense. Since Doug took the job of deputy managing editor for special sections and new initiatives in January 2014, and even before that, he’s done spectacular work matching our journalism with advertising opportunities. Some for instances: Doug conceived and then executed a magazine special section on the opening of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute; he conjured up and oversaw a magazine section on Angell Memorial Hospital; he devised and ran the summertime Cape Cod sections for two years running; he oversaw special magazines or sections on the University of Massachusetts, MIT, and the Boston Children’s Museum. Doug could basically fund his own small newsroom with the proceeds — and as important, he provided the reader with often fascinating journalism, some of our most widely read online.
So the question became whether it would be better for the advertising department to have someone in the newsroom to connect our missions, as Doug already did, or whether it would be better for the newsroom to have someone work in advertising to press our cause and preserve our values. In the end, the latter seems to be the best option in terms of opening up new possibilities and opportunities, so Doug will be leaving the Globe newsroom next week to take a position in the front office with the loose title of director of growth initiatives.
This is a big deal move, certainly for Doug, but really for the entire Globe. Among Doug’s many talents, he has an innate understanding of our readers, a restless mind, and a fundamental drive to creatively wring revenue from journalism. This new position will have him, as ever, thinking both editorially and commercially. He will at times be focusing on projects as straightforward as a special section, but the job could also range to a ground-breaking initiatives to help grow our audience reach. He’ll be given the freedom to seek sponsorship opportunities and to have a hand in native advertising.
Doug will work especially closely with Tim Marken, the chief growth officer, Mike Sheehan, the CEO, and me — and by me, I mean us. Doug will remain a regular presence in the newsroom, welcome in all corners. And make no mistake, he will be seeking out your new and innovative ideas and pressing you to collaborate on his — ideas that will help fund the vital journalism that is produced by this organization.
I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of Doug’s unique qualifications, so just some highlights. Doug arrived here in 2003 with orders to revamp the Sunday Magazine, working closely with advertising, marketing, circulation, and production. Mission accomplished, in 2009, Doug stepped into the newly enhanced job of deputy managing editor/features, overseeing Living, Arts, Travel, and the magazine. He took his current job overseeing new initiatives in January 2014. Along the way, he also launched the hugely successful Sunday Address section, played a key contributing role in the stunning, premium Sunday magazines, and helped straighten the ship at boston.com when they hit some choppy seas last winter. Just a week ago, Doug created the special Head of the Charles section, sponsored by Capital One — another example of advertisers aggressively searching for unique and creative initiatives they can sponsor. This also helps explain why Mike and Tim are aggressively seeking to have Doug join their team.
There’s no need to do a formal sendoff for Doug, in that he’s not going anywhere far; in fact, you’ll still see him around all the time. He’ll start in his new position in the middle of the week. Please take a moment to thank Doug for all he’s done and wish him well on what’s to come.
Photo of Massachusetts General Hospital via Wikimedia Commons.
It was interesting to see the various levels of relationships involved in The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team article on double-booked surgeries at Massachusetts General Hospital. I count three:
Globe owner John Henry was a trustee at Mass. General from 2005 to 2014.
The Globe and Mass. General were partners (along with Harvard and MIT) in the recently concluded HUBweek, a series of events focusing on innovation, art and culture.
One of the Mass. General patients who believes double-booking resulted in permanent injury is former Red Sox pitcher Bobby Jenks. And Henry, of course, is the Red Sox’ principal owner.
The Globe handled these relationships by disclosing Henry’s ownership stake in the newspaper and the baseball team.
More important, for those who worry that such matters will interfere with the Globe’s ability to product public-interest journalism, the story is tough and comprehensive. They’re not celebrating at Mass. General today.
The Huffington Post has published a tremendous, heartbreaking story on the death of a temporary worker at an Amazon warehouse. The employee worked for a temp agency, but was hoping to be promoted to a permanent position with Amazon. Instead, he died of an apparent heart attack at a warehouse not far from Richmond, Virginia.
Unlike The New York Times’ recent exposé of Amazon’s brutal culture at the upper echelons, there are no obvious villains in the HuffPost story, written by Dave Jamieson and illustrated by Davide Bonazzi. Neither Amazon nor the temp agency, Integrity, did anything obviously wrong. Rather, the story examines in detail a culture of corporate greed that makes it nearly impossible for working-class people to lead decent lives. In my opinion, this is a much more important piece of journalism than the Times story.
