What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
1–10 of 270 posts
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#2I was pretty shocked by how over-the-top and lacking in context the Times piece was. Lots of industries have pretty intense work cultures (management consulting, medicine, wall street). The focus on Amazon and the exaggerated language made the piece seem very agenda-driven (EVERYONE cries at their desk? really?)
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#3Interesting note: the hiring of Jay Carney (Feb 26, 2015) coincides exactly with this article ("We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the publication date in mid-August"). I wonder if such a high-visibility PR hire came about /because/ of this article?
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#4There are several shockingly inappropriate things in this article. In particular, the PR person at Amazon is saying that they would have shared employee's personal records (including evaluations) as well as other employee's termination conditions (which I consider unrelated to their quotes).
Amazon: what Carney just posted was very inappropriate. I am completely amazed you did this (assuming it was done with approval at the company level). You should be aware that you will start having serious problems hiring and retaining quality employees if you post things like this about your employees.
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#5Goes back at least as far as the 1980's, remember the Pulitzer Prize the Washington Post had to give up after one of their reporters literally made up a story about an 8 year old heroin addict.
Just because it's in a major newspaper, don't believe reporting is evenly balanced or without an agenda.
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#6It's actually weird to see a company firing back this publicly, releasing performance data (no matter if positive or negative) on previous employees, and it all being posted not by the CEO or a HR VP, but by the head of PR.
[Edit: Not only it smells of whitewashing, but it also looks deceptive.
And PR? Seriously? Not only it's a sleazy piece, but Amazon chose the worst possible position to convey the message. Get some engineer, accountant, designer, heck, get the HR intern who just joined 2 weeks ago to talk about this.
It would have more credibility than a PR person who's been in the company for less than one year.]
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#7Interesting note: the hiring of Jay Carney (Feb 26, 2015) coincides exactly with this article ("We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the publication date in mid-August"). I wonder if such a high-visibility PR hire came about /because/ of this article?
I'm sure it would have been a multi-month process to hire for a position like Carney's so it likely would have started well before that February date.
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#8While selective storytelling has been a staple of traditional news media for ages, this article does tempt me to ask: why Amazon? Of all the workaholic culture tech companies of the last 20 years, why did the New York Times choose to center the exposé on Amazon.com?
My entirely baseless suspicion is that unlike many other tech companies, Amazon is a direct competitor in its ability to drive information to their customers through their proprietary devices and channels, and can also slowly chip away at the newspaper's clout with Amazon ratings for books displacing the Times' bestseller list, for example. Instead of reading Times' reviews of books, films, products, and so on, a customer might consider Amazon's 5-star review system to be enough for them.
Amazon's work culture is hardly unique in corporate America, especially among the tech industry. The New York Times knew that they would make an adversary with that piece. They chose their target carefully.
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#9This is written by Jay Carney. Yes, that Jay Carney. Apparently he's working for Amazon now.
Two months after Bezos' internal memo is "leaked" to the press saying that the Amazon in the NYT peice isn't the Amazon he knows, and that employees should email him directly if something like that happens. Now it's time for the offensive. Apparently two months is the amount of time you no longer have to pretend to care about work conditions, and go back to reputation.
This medium piece attacks the character of the NYT's source, which is comedy gold coming from someone who was paid to be a lying weaselly bastard, performing active disservice to the citizenry.
Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
#10It's actually weird to see a company firing back this publicly, releasing performance data (no matter if positive or negative) on previous employees, and it all being posted not by the CEO or a HR VP, but by the head of PR. [Edit: Not only it smells of whitewashing, but it also looks deceptive. And PR? Seriously? Not only it's a sleazy piece, but Amazon chose the worst possible position to convey the message. Get som…
I predict they will take down this article and issue an apology.