Brauchli’s interest in journalism sprouted early. By the tenth grade he was already writing and taking pictures for a weekly newspaper in Boulder. At Columbia University, where he arrived in 1979, he gravitated toward the Columbia Spectator, and became a stringer and contributor to The New York Times while still an undergraduate. In 1982, he worked briefly as a copyboy at the Times. But the young Brauchli set his sights on The Wall Street Journal, and in 1984, he was hired as a Hong Kong correspondent for the AP-Dow Jones news service; his beat included Taiwan, China, and the Philippines. His bosses were immediately impressed: “He seemed like a really fine breed of hunting dog who was on the hunt,” says Rusty Todd, who edited Brauchli in Hong Kong. “I don’t want to blow too much smoke up his ass, but he seemed really eager to learn.” Brauchli became the Journal’s Tokyo correspondent in 1988, and landed the post of China bureau chief in 1995. Along with some friends, he launched a nightclub in Shanghai called Park 97 that, in his words, “became very trendy, especially so after I left China and stopped loitering around the back tables in the lounge.”
I asked Paul Steiger, the Journal’s longtime managing editor who now oversees ProPublica, where Brauchli ranked in the pantheon of Journal foreign correspondents. Steiger replied that he was not in the highest class—a class that included Tony Horwitz, Geraldine Brooks, Andrew Higgins, and Ian Johnson. “I wouldn’t put Marcus at that level,” Steiger said. Rather, he was in “the top ten percent.” Steiger is full of praise for Brauchli, recalling that, in 1991, when Marcus was on his way to Harvard to begin his Nieman fellowship, he asked him to go to Pakistan to do some reporting on a huge banking scandal involving the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, or BCCI. “In a very short space of time, he did three or four just terrific stories, both on his own and in collaboration with other people.” Adds Steiger: “He was a charismatic star reporter who could do everything from politics to heavy finance. And cultural stuff, too.”
His finest reportage chronicled patronage and instability in Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan, illegal logging in the Philippine rain forests, and the World Bank’s cozy relationship with the Indonesian dictator Suharto. But at least one of his clips makes for uncomfortable reading in hindsight. On April 27, 1995, Brauchli wrote a page-one story for the Journal that chronicled Enron’s plan to establish power plants in India. The article, datelined Guhagar, India, began: “High on a remote volcanic bluff overlooking the Arabian Sea here, a U.S. group is carving out a more modern future for India. Not everybody is ready for it.” In Brauchli’s upbeat narrative, Enron executives were depicted as bright-eyed, well-intentioned entrepreneurs, while Indian politicians and activists who asked pointed questions about Enron, which would be exposed as a criminal syndicate in 2001, come off as stuffy bureaucrats and backward-looking nationalists. (Oddly, Brauchli included the Enron piece in the pile he gave to me.)
Many people interviewed for this profile noted Brauchli’s considerable intelligence—and his colossal ambition. Byron Calame, who spent thirty-nine years at the Journal, where he held a range of positions that included deputy managing editor before becoming the second public editor of The New York Times, calls him “a very sophisticated journalist. A very sophisticated global thinker.” Those qualities, combined with his swift rise through the ranks, earned him a nickname at the Journal—“the Rocket.” In her fine new book, War at The Wall Street Journal, which informs the paragraphs that follow concerning Brauchli and the Journal, Sarah Ellison calls Brauchli “a master manipulator of newsroom politics” at Dow Jones. His sharp elbows and acerbic tongue facilitated his rise. “Marcus was go, go, go, go,” says Calame. “Marcus was feisty. Marcus could be way too political and competitive, and had a tendency to single out his competitors and make it personal.” Calame remarked to a colleague in the late 1990s, when Brauchli was getting ready to take up the post of national editor: “I’m tired of Marcus coming into my office and running people down.”
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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