Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' troubled Washington Post lost two star reporters Tuesday–both of them poached by the magazine owned by Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Ashley Parker, a three-time Pulitzer prize winner, and Michael Scherer had both been political reporters for the newspaper but are leaving to join The Atlantic. The departures bring down the curtain on a year roiled by crisis for the Post, which lost 200,000 subscribers in just a few days after Bezos intervened to stop it endorsing Kamala Harris before the presidential election. Bezos claimed the decision had nothing to do with his businesses being at risk of revenge from Donald Trump; he has subsequently dined with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago. And the paper’s CEO and publisher Will Lewis clashed with staff as he warned there had to be radical change because of the scale of its financial losses, which were expected to top $70 million this year alone. Lewis is also accused in a British court by Prince Harry of leading a cover-up of criminality for his then boss Rupert Murdoch at the Fox tycoon’s British newspapers. Lewis denies wrongdoing. The New York Times, which first reported the moves, said that Powell Jobs had been personally involved in the “hiring push” at The Atlantic, the venerable magazine that she bought in 2017 through her Emerson Collective. The magazine is reported to be profitable, unlike The Post. However, Bezos' wealth estimated by Forbes at $235 billion, far outstrips that of Powell Jobs, at $16.1 billion.
