The Washington Post is haunted by its history. Dominated by towering figures such as Katharine Graham (who died in 2001), Ben Bradlee (who stepped down as executive editor in 1991), and the reporters who pursued the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the mythology of the Post was always grander than the reality. No other newspaper enjoyed quite the hype the Post did during its heyday. And few papers are as defined by their city as the Post has been defined by Washington—“Washington” meaning both the nation’s capital and a metropolis in its own right. Don Graham’s devotion to his city has never wavered. “I can’t imagine existing anywhere else,” he told me when I sat down with him recently. From the moment he became publisher, in 1979, he insisted that the newspaper must concentrate on its Washington readers. But not everyone got the message. Inside the Post, there was always a powerful tension between Graham’s view and the view of the newsroom, which, starting with Bradlee and for a period of decades, sought to compete on a national stage with The New York Times—and to a significant degree succeeded.
For much of that time, the paper’s profits supported both views. Then came the Internet and new competition for readers and advertising dollars. The Post’s response to dwindling revenues has been to narrow its focus again to Washington. The paper’s current publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is Don Graham’s niece, embodied her approach in a slogan in 2008: for and about washington. But the newspaper is no longer the only publication laying claim to that title. It must now fight off threats from online upstarts and other D.C.-focused outlets, such as Politico, National Journal, and Roll Call, which have eaten into the Post’s revenues and undercut its mission. The newspaper division of the company posted an operating loss of $193 million in 2008 and $164 million in 2009. For the first nine months of 2011, the division reported an operating loss of $25.6 million. Daily circulation of the print edition is now just over 500,000, down from 830,000 two decades ago. The Post’s belated attempt to revive its Web site has drawn traffic, but the effort has been plagued by technical issues. The key architect of the site’s redesign said in January that he was leaving the paper. Meanwhile, the Post has been losing some of its most talented journalists, let go in buyouts or wooed away by more ambitious and wealthier rivals. (The most recent round of buyouts, the fifth since 2003, was announced in February.) The newspaper has shuttered all of its national bureaus, and the newsroom churns with rumors of a deteriorating relationship between Weymouth and the editor she hired just a few years ago, Marcus Brauchli.
The desire to compete as a journalistic enterprise on a national or international level—to do so comprehensively and consistently—seems to have been beaten out of the Post. The disaffection on the newsroom floor is audible and undisguised. With every year there are fewer journalistic voices in America that combine seriousness of purpose with high standards and relentless ambition, and that can sometimes reach and inform the nation as a whole. What is at stake is very simple: whether the Post can remain one of them.
