Were damning anecdotes about Amazon workplace fair?

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$1 trillion
Amazon became only the second company, behind Apple, to reach the $1 trillion market valuation.
Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

In the news business, a story that has legs stays in our heads, conversations and spins off follow-up headlines. Such was this week’s major newspaper expose describing Amazon as a hellish pressure cooker where employees cry at their desks.

Not everyone agreed with The New York Times piece that drew this conclusion after interviews with more than 100 current and former workers. Now even a Times editor is questioning whether the story was fair.

Public editor Margaret Sullivan, whose job is to weigh-in on criticism about the paper’s reporting, wondered whether anecdotes paint a complete and accurate picture.

“But does the article, with complete fairness, nail down the reality of life as an Amazon employee?” Sullivan wrote in a column published online Wednesday. “No serious questions (to my knowledge) have arisen about the hard facts. That’s to The Times’s credit. But that may partly be because the article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by generalization and anecdote. For such a damning result, presented with so much drama, that doesn’t seem like quite enough.”

The scathing article, published Sunday with the headline “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” is among the most emailed and most viewed ever on the newspaper’s website. The string of comments running at the bottom of the lengthy article is approaching 6,000.

The buzz was heard around the internet. CEO Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to employees, saying the article does not describe the Amazon he knows and urged workers to report employee abuses. Another employee wrote a rebuttal on LinkedIn, saying the article by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld made false claims, spun half-truths and was toned with an on-going bias the paper has against the company.

Sullivan included comments from the Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who disagreed with her conclusions, and said reporting on corporations is challenging because they are not subject to the same transparency laws as government.

“I reject the notion that you can report a story like this in any way other than with anecdotes,” Baquet said. “You talk to as many people as possible and you draw conclusions. That’s the only way to approach it.”

Much of the criticism contends the article may describe past isolated events but that there is no mention of changes made to make the workplace happy and rewarding.

Source: Geek Wire

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