Vanity Fair: Has the Washington Post Lost Its Way?

Article they've been promoting finally out. Sarah Ellison focuses much on the tension between the business side's local focus and the news side's national ambitions.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/04/washington-post-watergate

 

Remember a few years ago when everyone in the media had to pretend like Katharine Weymouth wasn't in over her head and got the job for reasons other than being Kay Graham's favorite granddaughter?

Glad those days are gone.

 

A very fair piece. But the most stunning thing I took away was if Don Graham wasn't such a nice guy and had leaned on Zuckerberg to honor their verbal agreement, the Wash Post Corp would own 10 percent of Facebook right now and be $7 billion richer. Yowza.

 

Charlie Pierce in the Esquire politics blog makes it a point to always refer to the Washington Post as "a once-great newspaper now d/b/a an unprofitable subsidiary of the educational-testing industry."

 

One major problem for the Post: They have a giant technology and business hub just across the river, and they have no clue how to cover it. They hire a bunch of people -- particularly young kids on the Metro desk -- who think everything south and west of the Potomac, from Arlington, Va., to Arlington, Texas, is a giant anthropology experiment.

Fairfax and Loudoun County are swimming in money, and the closest thing they have to a daily paper is Patch.

 

I don't understand all this ragging on the Washington Post. Compared to almost every newspaper in America, they're still doing a very good job. How many newspapers have declined less than the Washington Post? The NYT. The WSJ. How many others? The list isn't long.

 

Perhaps not to the same extent, in terms of affluence, but the same is true in the Maryland suburbs. The only dailies are in Annapolis and Frederick. It's bizarre in that region, that there are those huge, largely wealthy suburban counties with no daily papers. I have lived and worked in much smaller areas that were loaded with small dailies.

 

I don't think there is much difference between what the WP is going through and what all papers are going through.
You figure people worked their way up through the ranks to get to the WP and are disappointed that it isn't what it was when they got into the field. Guess what? No paper is what it once was.
The regional giant is now just a major metro. The major metro is just a daily paper. The daily is now a thrice-weekly. The thrice-weekly is now a glorified shopper.
In some ways the WP and the NYT are luckier than most - their audience (pols and media types) still READ the actual paper. (It makes for a better prop than to hold up an iPad).

 

Stick to what you know best - journalism, news, in the revenue-producing print edition - and quit trying to do too much with overworked, depleted staffs.

Or spread yourself too thin with younger, sometimes unmotivated staffs managed by people who may not know much more about the industry than the latest iWhatever.

Is your reporter best served spending time doing a podcast or talking with a source and developing something substantial?

Charles Pierce is right.

 

Vanity Fair is the perfect showcase for this article. Condé Nast has absolutely thrived during this recession.

 

Dan, the picture you posted gets to the Post's big problem. It's edited on the principle that the only readers it has who matter to it are Congress, its staff, the President and his staff and maybe Cabinet secretaries and Supreme Court justices. That's not very many readers in a metro region of three million-plus. It said it wanted to be Washington's paper, and then defined Washington as "the U.S. political class."