A There’s usually not too much going on in the workspace of the Main Media Center in Milan, a huge exposed concrete castle that describes itself as the “largest convention center in Europe”. In the large work area for the writing journalists, perhaps one in ten workplaces is occupied this morning.
But there are still the individual offices that the big sports media and news agencies have rented. Maybe there’s more going on, I ask myself as I knock on the doors Sports Illustratedthe New York Times or the AFP agency. Moment! Didn’t it say “Washington Post”?
Also the newspaper whose owner Jeff Bezos just fired a bunch of their top editors, had rented a private office in Milan. Take a look? There are six desks inside. Five are unoccupied. Les Carpenter sits at one and greets me warmly. Yes, he is also one of those released. When he arrived in 2018 Post came, he was already one of the most renowned in our guild. It didn’t help him.
The news of the expulsion reached him while he was already in Milan. “We did the best sports reporting in the USA,” he says, sounding perplexed. And anyway, they would have set standards Washington Post. They had all the resources, the best researchers, the best editors and the best authors, and yet it didn’t pay off.
Escape into gallows humor
The orgy of layoffs was a business decision, he says, to avoid the question of the political significance of the upheavals in the paper. Somehow he is still loyal to his employer. He doesn’t know exactly how long he will be employed. Maybe until April.
But he will probably have to vacate his office when he returns to Washington after the games. Whether my newspaper doesn’t have a job offer for him. The salary should be six figures, he says with a grin on his face. I’d rather not tell him what he would earn at the taz.
Carpenter takes refuge in gallows humor. Maybe he’ll just stay in Milan, stay at his table and watch what’s happening around him. Some trade fairs and congresses about something – and he’s in the middle of it all. Then he continues writing.
In the first week he does a lot about figure skating. About Alysia Liu, for examplewho almost missed her first competition because her bus was stopped to allow US Vice President JD Vance’s painfully long line to travel.