Some longtime readers are worried. A year ago James Fallows returned to Washington after three years in China. The bundle on his doorstep left him dismayed: “I’ve thought of the Post as my hometown paper for years,” he wrote, “and feel as if I’ve come back to see a family member looking suddenly very ill.” “It’s not as good as it was,” says Charles Peters, the longtime editor of The Washington Monthly. “I attribute this to the loss of so many good reporters. There is much less original reporting than there was. There is less to read. It’s a faster read. You have to depend more on The New York Times than you did before.” Seymour Hersh says: “We all worry about the survival of the Post.”
Bradlee and Downie presided over a Post that, for the most part, was quite profitable. Brauchli is not so fortunate: he wasn’t hired to expand the Post, but to shrink it. He knows the odds he is up against: “I’m taking a lot of arrows in the back now, and it’s okay,” he told longtime Post political editor Maralee Schwartz in March 2009. “In a year this is going to be a better place.” His mandate is to remake one of our legendary newspapers for a radically different era. And he must do that under the shadow of two great editors and with far fewer resources than they had. He must commandeer a smaller, faster vessel while forestalling a mutiny among the crew. That crew is not on the verge of insurrection, but neither is it enamored of its skipper.
On a sweltering Friday in early June, I sat down for two hours of conversation with Brauchli in his spacious office at the Post, which overlooks a sleek and newly rebuilt newsroom. On the day I visited, the newsroom was as hushed as an insurance office, and I was struck by how young the staff was; I saw few people who looked older than fifty. (Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti won’t say how many employees have taken buyouts in recent years. But in his new book Morning Miracle, a shaggy obituary for the old Post, Dave Kindred writes that nearly four hundred newsroom staff members have exited.) Brauchli is tall and lanky, with a receding hairline and a tight smile. He wore an ordinary blue suit and a cranberry-colored tie. I thought of Philip Marlowe’s description of his friend Bernie Ohls in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: “He looked like anybody you would pass on the street.”
The Post continues to decline. It's Op-Ed pages are bloated with predictable opinions and arrogant old White guys. they probably provide revenue via syndication, but it's a weak link in the paper and not a good way to engage younger readers. The local reporting is done by people obviously don't know or care about the DC area. they hope to do a Woodtsein and jump to something with more status. Theiy point with pride to the "AIDS spending scancal" consisted of reporting on something that had had happened several years prior, in which the principals had already left their positions and DC. The new political reporters are just awful and obviously take their cues from GOP hill staffers. Shailaigh Murray, Perry Bacon, Jr, and Lori Montgomery, in particular, are just awful. The paper's reporting on health care reform was devoid of information on the competing bills and their consequences--all horse race and GOP spin. The paper has become increasingly shallow and superficial in its reporting. Even 20 years ago, when I first moved to DC, the paper was uneven: then, a terrible Redskins-centric sports section, horrible movie reviewers, dumb science & health reporting, but solid hard news, except for the local reporting, which was weak. Now the whole paper is weak, except for a few slecet areas and columns. WaPo has lost excellent national and foreign reporters and it lost promising webstars (Froomkin, Weigle) who offended the wrong insiders. The paper's insiderish slant is killing it journalistically and preventing from seeing its own decline.
#1 Posted by Rich, CJR on Thu 16 Sep 2010 at 03:09 PM
This is a really solid piece. Congratulations.
Tom Edsall
#2 Posted by Thomas B. Edsall, CJR on Thu 16 Sep 2010 at 08:10 PM
The Post has morphed into a conservative newspaper in a liberal metropolitan area. The newspaper may have done some market surveys, which show that their readership consists increasingly of older, affluent and conservative white folks. "Content" seems to be largely from inside-the-Beltway right wing think tanks. Hence, a boring newspaper in its last days.
#3 Posted by James Simmons, CJR on Fri 17 Sep 2010 at 09:59 AM
There is a parallel between the “salons” scandal and The Post’s daily reporting on Washington. It is clear in both instances that access is paramount at the paper. Top officials, both on the business and editorial side, want to give access to make money and maintain access by formulating most of its stories in the “he said, she said,” mode. It still has more resources than most papers, but it is clearly no longer a journalistic leader.
#4 Posted by Bob Griendling (NewsCommonsense.com), CJR on Fri 17 Sep 2010 at 10:54 AM
Brauchli should be on a sort leash, if he is not already. While the staffers at the Post remain some of the best, their writing and the editing have nothing to do with Brauchli. They were great journalists and editors before he arrived. He is aloof and not well-respected, not in the newsroom or throughout the paper. Forget about reporters and editors comparing him to past greats, they are intelligent enough to evaluate his leadership ability on merit. That said, there are more issues with Post management than just Brauchli. Ms. Weymouth has surrounded herself with a group of individuals that have failed to gain the respect of those they were put in charge to lead.
#5 Posted by Cameron, CJR on Sat 18 Sep 2010 at 09:19 PM
I confess I haven't read the Post in years, so have no idea how good or bad the paper is now. And it's clear that Brauchli has made more than his share of missteps, some major; few of even his friends would argue otherwise. So it's easy to see where things have gone badly since he took over.
But the broader question that the article begs is, what would success look like? It's a paper that has lost at least a quarter of its staff, was saddled with a split print/online newsroom (in two locations), faced with plunging revenues and other challenges.
Downie, to his credit, managed the journalism at the Post exceptionally well over the years of declining resources; he may well have been the best at it among US editors. But it didn't really put the paper on any firmer a financial footing, and Brauchli's job now is to try and find some sustainable business with fewer and fewer resources.
That's not to say he's doing a good job at all; only that this is pretty untrod ground for everyone. There are few US papers that could stand a comparison with their 10- or 20-year-ago selves.
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