Vanity Fair: Has the Washington Post Lost Its Way?

I'm looking at the WaPo Web site right now. Here's what I see in terms of stories, in order:

Shooter/Taliban mashup
Texas Voter ID
A 59 seconds video about I think, Gas Prices. But it doesn't say
Gas Prices
Romneycare/politics
Tea Party Catholicism
Bank foreclosure practices
The Case of the Angry White Woman
Priest who denied communion to lesbian
Robert Griffin III

I had to go ten stories deep before I found anything that wasn't hot button/politics/courts news.

Yeah, I know, it's a dirty world out there. But if you wonder why the Style section took a dump...

 

Really? Looks like most of those are hot button politics -- Taliban, voter ID, gas prices, Romneycare, Tea Party, banks, communion ... everything except RGIII and perhaps the Angry White Woman. (I don't know what that is.)

 

I meant "wasn't" hot button. Left out the words. I'll fix it.

 

What you put in parens there should hold more weight than you're giving it. People don't just care about any old guy with a gun. They care about the guy with the gun who shot someone down the street.

You're right, though, that newspapers have to hire people who have real skills in writing Web heds and constant story placement on the Web.

 

Never argued the second thing. You may be right, though. Not a topic I care all that much about.

As for the first, of course, people still desire some pieces of local information. But that was only a very small portion of information your typical newspaper provided. Most of the news people are interested in--at least among the well-educated, 20-somethings that consume A LOT of information I hang out with--lacks any link to a particular geographic location. We are all far more invested in certain types of information whether about national politics, music, economics, law, etc. In the old days, we would have relied on our newspaper for whatever bits of information they would have doled out to us each week and pray the TV columnist happened to write about a show we cared about. Now, the Internet provides easy access to websites where we can get much more focused analysis on those topics.

 

Just for what it's worth: I'm 24. I still read newspapers' content regularly, but more and more I'm reading it online, on my laptop or iPad. For national news, I usually check CNN or MSNBC. Sports news, ESPN.com and SI.com, and sometimes Yahoo! Sports. Local news, local and regional papers, almost always online.

That's just for news. I still do a ton of reading just for reading's sake in print. Read physical books all the time. Love getting the Best American series from Amazon or the library. And when I do want to read something online, most of the time I print it out.

I think that people who love reading will always go for a printed version over an electronic version.

But I do think people are getting more and more inclined to get their news, straight news, on their computers, tablets, and phones.

It's just easier.

 

People in their twenties not reading the local rag has been a cri de coeur of the newspaper industry since at least the 1980s.

It's only once they buy into their community in their thirties by settling down, having kids, etc etc, do those articles on the school board become interesting.

 

In the specific case of this newspaper, I have to believe most of their Web site readers are from out of town, outside the reach of its advertisers, precisely because of the paper's focus on national politics.

 

Washington Post is light years better than most, if not all the big city metros.

A better overall paper than anyone else, besides, maybe the L.A. Times, on a daily basis.

Maybe it isn't as good as it was however many years ago, but what paper can honestly claim it is better now than it was a decade ago?

 

Content is just something to tuck coupon inserts inside.

 

Hey, she may replace Erin Esurance as my cartoon crush.

 

So? Shouldn't it be?