‘We Still Have a Sports Section for a Few Days, and Readers Need Me to Tell a Story’
Les Carpenter, an Olympics reporter, was one of hundreds of Washington Post journalists laid off last week. He still feels responsible to the audience of what he calls “the last American sports section.”
Last Wednesday, Les Carpenter, a sports reporter for the Washington Post, was sitting next to his colleague, Rick Maese, in the press area of the Winter Games in Milan. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and they were on the same Zoom call as their coworkers on the East Coast, listening to the devastating announcement that the Post would lay off more than a third of its journalists. The sports section was first in line: every reporter and editor was fired or reassigned. Maese was kept. Carpenter was let go.
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