It’s mostly just sad to watch one of the US’s best newspapers slide slowly but inexorably into irrelevance. It’s not all publisher Katharine Weymouth‘s fault, but sure as eggs is eggs, she’ll be blamed. Weymouth’s seemingly sole objective has been to kill, er, integrate Washington Post Digital with the company’s print operations since she became publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post Media Group in 2008.
Weymouth, Katherine Graham‘s granddaughter and Donald Graham‘s niece, this week disclosed that she was aiming for a Washington Post Digital funeral, er, integration date of January 1, 2010, taking two giant steps closer to her goal. What’s most surprising in Weymouth’s announcement is that digital advertising and marketing will be set up separately from their print counterparts. This is an 180-degree turn from the day Weymouth took over as chief executive of the newly-created Washington Post Media entity in February 2008, when the business sides of the online and print divisions were merged, “while maintaining separate newsrooms and editorial decision-making.”
Caroline Little, who was the head of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive resigned two months after Weymouth took over and Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com executive editor, left later in 2008.
Weymouth was also responsible for the Post‘s infamous alternative business plan: charging lobbyists US$25,000 and up to sponsor private, off-the record dinner parties—Weymouth called them “salons”—with Post journalists at her home. She backtracked almost immediately when the story broke.
Washington City Paper broke the news (be sure to read the illuminating comments) that there were washingtonpost.com layoffs accompanying Weymouth’s memo, something that Weymouth peculiarly—or perhaps not—failed to mention herself.
Former washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady sums up the Post‘s editorial merge and decline into irrelevance nicely in his True/Slant article, “What real journalists do:”
“It’s the attitude of Stone Age commenters like these that still pervades far too many print newsrooms. Instead of attempting to adapt to what is clearly a digital future, they complain about the world collapsing around them, yet demean anyone who tries to do anything differently. And they wonder why so many people have stopped listening to them, both professionally and personally.”
Every major US newspaper is facing the current perils of the Post. The print side continues to provide most of the (rapidly decreasing) revenue while simultaneously consuming most of the resources. Meanwhile the web side is growing rapidly with much fewer resources, although it’s less profitable. Unfortunately, the Post has taken the low road, cutting the innovative web folks and keeping the dead wood. Here’s hoping the other news organizations take the higher road.
One of the reasons I’ve decided to keep a low-profile in the upcoming Other Future of the News conference in the Twin Cities (no link because it currently exists only as a Google Wave)—I’ll participate by mostly listening—is because the young whippersnappers who have never not known the web know lots of stuff we old farts don’t. We know a lot that they don’t as well, but just now, what they know is much more important.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.