It goes back to Katherine Graham, who owned the Post back in its glory days. She was pretty far left, but knew the boundaries between news reporting and opinion.
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WashPost Loses $77 Million
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
A lot of that same crowd consider Romney to be "a liberal" as well.
Robert Winnett will be staying on Fleet Street after all. So there went that part of the plan. Not surprising. Gift link:
The drip, drip, drip continues, this time with strong hints of conflicts of interest.
While newsrooms can be fractious places, it does seem that Will Lewis isn't able to carry the newsroom along with him. The mutual distrust is palpable.
The Post's corporate response was that these conformed to the Post's own policies, but reading the full story, I believe that the reporters of this story are clearly skeptical.
While newsrooms can be fractious places, it does seem that Will Lewis isn't able to carry the newsroom along with him. The mutual distrust is palpable.
And the journalists think they won, while the circulation / subscriber base is shrinking and, as Winnett said to them, "nobody is reading your articles".
The oft-used analogy of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is a good fit here.
The oft-used analogy of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is a good fit here.
Who would have won if Winnett had survived?
Whatever its current problems (which are not specific to the Post but affecting the entire industry), the Post has a brand that is the polar opposite of what Winnett's track record in the UK has been.
There's nowhere to gain paying readers by turning the Post into the UK Sun or the NY Post or even the Wall Street Journal. The consumers who want that flavor of news have long since been poisoned on the WaPo brand and aren't going to be inclined to sample it no matter who's now editing it. And anyway, that end of the market is glutted with free or cheap offerings from Sinclair and Fox News and NewsNation and Newsmax and Epoch Times and on and on and on.
I suspect it became very clear to Bezos that if Winnett stayed and Post journalists left en masse, the existing reader base (which is still one of the largest in the country, even if it's shrinking) would start shrinking even faster with few new customers coming in to replace it.
And once a brand is damaged, you and I both know how hard it is to bring it back.
The Post isn't the Titanic, yet, but it may well have just avoided being steered directly into the iceberg by the wrong captain.
Perhaps the paper itself. As it is, nobody, from Bezos on down, is winning.
And, given the losses at the Post, perhaps a dose of successful reality would have been an answer. Winnett did one thing, which was to make his papers entertaining. After being subscribed for years to the Post, I dropped it about 2 years ago as it was not fun to read any longer. Maybe it was informative, but it was to tainted with the same "we have to save the world" attitude that resulted in the reversal of Winnett.
I'm not sure that is true. The brand stands for something solid, but it also stood for an interesting, informative and even entertaining read. That's the fault of the current reporting staff. A bit of "lightening up" would have been nice.
Just because the apparent new editor has done "popular class" papers does not mean he did not understand his audience or potential one at the post. Just as some of us have programmed everything from country to rock, a good editor first has to understand his audience and the try to serve them. In this case, the audience was shrinking and something had to be done to make the Post more interesting and appealing.
But we don't know he was going to do that. I suspect the opposite: that he was going to try to reestablish the Nixon era "news as our nation's story" style.
And there it would have been because the jornalists... whose stories were not being read as Winnett said... have essentially crucified a potential savior. The paper, as it is now, is not worth continuing to publish.
In the case of the Post, the brand is stronger than the current crew of horrible journalists who have made it dull, boring and unreadable. As a lifetime follower of the press who comes from a newspaper family, I always liked the paper even when it deviated from my political beliefs on the opinion page. But when the writing became like a dull college lecture of an honored professor talking down to first semester dullards, I left.
Or it might have been refreshed and made actually readable again. It is still headed towards the iceberg, and it is going faster because the crew thinks that they have won a moral victory. A Pyrrhic Victory is more like it.
Keep in mind that the Post has a tier of reporters who are in their own league. They don't work for a paper or an editor. They do enterprise reporting, and write books that the paper uses for exclusives. Those writers have their own fan bases. Whatever they write gets read. You see them daily on cable TV. They continue to rake in the awards, and break big stories. I doubt that group is paying attention to the soap opera.
I keep trying to reply but my browser is eating my replies for some weird reason whenever I do a multi-quote. So I will try to
summarize.
This particular controversy isn't a matter of making the newspaper more "popular". Will Lewis no doubt would probably like to frame it that way, to divert attention from the ways in which his ethical values appear to diverge from those of mainstream American journalism. Rather, it's an issue of incoming leadership whose ethical values aren't in line with those of his staff. If the values of a leader aren't in line with those of his or her staff, there are going to be problems. That's true of any business, not just newspapers. Values matter. In the case of the Post, a newspaper whose brand was made through investigative, tough journalism, there has to be adherence to values that totally avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. If you're going to do tough reporting, you damn well better make sure your nose is clean. Otherwise, your motives come into question and you lose credibility. Scott is absolutely right; this affects the brand adversely and, once you lose that brand, it will take decades for it to come back if at all.
This also isn't about who's winning or losing. The only way Rob Winnett was going to be able to lead the Post newsroom was to have a wholesale turnover in staff. That in itself would cause problems. His track record was problematic.
Lewis is showing bad judgment in assuming that American readers won't care that the values of British journalism don't preclude certain personal conflicts of interest, don't preclude paying for stories and don't preclude getting access to personal voice mails through direct subterfuge. (Imagine the awkward position in which that would put the Post's excellent cybersecurity reporter, Joseph Menn.) Lewis also appears to be stonewalling his own reporters. Not a good look, to say the least.
So David finds the Post's writing to be boring. (I don't. I think the Post's website and apps should be redesigned to require a lot less scrolling and to not put opinion articles ahead of breaking news, but that's a different matter. I also find the Wall Street Journal to be a boring patchwork of pedestrian topics.) A few good writing coaches would be a lot less expensive and more effective than trying to turn the paper upside-down with a wholesale executive overhaul.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. The Post will change one way or another but whether it changes for the better, both in terms of content and in terms of finances, is not at all certain.
summarize.
This particular controversy isn't a matter of making the newspaper more "popular". Will Lewis no doubt would probably like to frame it that way, to divert attention from the ways in which his ethical values appear to diverge from those of mainstream American journalism. Rather, it's an issue of incoming leadership whose ethical values aren't in line with those of his staff. If the values of a leader aren't in line with those of his or her staff, there are going to be problems. That's true of any business, not just newspapers. Values matter. In the case of the Post, a newspaper whose brand was made through investigative, tough journalism, there has to be adherence to values that totally avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. If you're going to do tough reporting, you damn well better make sure your nose is clean. Otherwise, your motives come into question and you lose credibility. Scott is absolutely right; this affects the brand adversely and, once you lose that brand, it will take decades for it to come back if at all.
This also isn't about who's winning or losing. The only way Rob Winnett was going to be able to lead the Post newsroom was to have a wholesale turnover in staff. That in itself would cause problems. His track record was problematic.
Lewis is showing bad judgment in assuming that American readers won't care that the values of British journalism don't preclude certain personal conflicts of interest, don't preclude paying for stories and don't preclude getting access to personal voice mails through direct subterfuge. (Imagine the awkward position in which that would put the Post's excellent cybersecurity reporter, Joseph Menn.) Lewis also appears to be stonewalling his own reporters. Not a good look, to say the least.
So David finds the Post's writing to be boring. (I don't. I think the Post's website and apps should be redesigned to require a lot less scrolling and to not put opinion articles ahead of breaking news, but that's a different matter. I also find the Wall Street Journal to be a boring patchwork of pedestrian topics.) A few good writing coaches would be a lot less expensive and more effective than trying to turn the paper upside-down with a wholesale executive overhaul.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. The Post will change one way or another but whether it changes for the better, both in terms of content and in terms of finances, is not at all certain.