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Decades ago, straight out of college, I moved to West Africa, intending to spend a year there to experience life abroad before deciding what sort of career to pursue back home in the United States. The fact that I am writing this column stems from decisions I made while traveling through the Sahel—and, in particular, from the existence then of a great and thriving U.S. newspaper, the Washington Post.

As a student, I had had no intention of becoming a journalist. Yet I knew that I loved to read and write, and on a spur, I began submitting little pieces from the road in Africa that, to my initial surprise, the Post, with its vocation of covering the world, began publishing.

Decades ago, straight out of college, I moved to West Africa, intending to spend a year there to experience life abroad before deciding what sort of career to pursue back home in the United States. The fact that I am writing this column stems from decisions I made while traveling through the Sahel—and, in particular, from the existence then of a great and thriving U.S. newspaper, the Washington Post.

As a student, I had had no intention of becoming a journalist. Yet I knew that I loved to read and write, and on a spur, I began submitting little pieces from the road in Africa that, to my initial surprise, the Post, with its vocation of covering the world, began publishing.

My decision to commit to journalism came after an awe-filled visit to the Post’s newsroom in Washington—the place where not so many years earlier, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had exposed a criminal scandal at the heart of the presidency of Richard Nixon. There I found myself one day, in the place where the Watergate scoops had been written, talking to editors who were eager to hear whatever I could tell them of life on the ground in a continent that was frequently under-covered. The Post was great in many ways, but I felt its seriousness in the editors’ quiet recognition of the gaps in their coverage of an entire continent, and in their eagerness to receive stories from someone like me.

The Post has experienced many ups and downs since that era, but nothing like what has just occurred under its current owner, Jeff Bezos, who has seemingly thrown........

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