Why didn’t Brauchli file a complaint with the committee? Brauchli has said that he interpreted the purpose of the committee as protecting the integrity of the paper, and as he told The Washington Post (July 8, 2008): “I never saw any evidence that the owners had tried to impose ideological and commercial agendas on the news coverage.” He went on to say: “What was important was the Journal, not me—that the editorial integrity be preserved, not that my job be preserved. Fighting for my job would have been mostly selfish and undermined the fight to maintain quality journalism.”
Not all of his colleagues shared that view. A veteran Journal reporter says: “When Marcus finally did resign, and left with his wheelbarrow of money, it was not a resignation like Jay Harris’s in San Jose. [In 2001, Harris resigned from the San Jose Mercury News, rather than implement draconian cuts ordered by Knight Ridder.] A lot of people at the Journal noticed that. There was no statement of principle from Marcus. There was disquiet in some sectors of the newsroom.”
After he was forced out as managing editor, Brauchli worked for three months as a consultant to News Corp. He says: “I was helping to think through how they might do business media in Asia.” Notes Keith Richburg: “I remember Marcus saying during that period: ‘the great thing about working for Murdoch is you walk into these places in India and China and people see you in a way they don’t want to see you when you are going out as a correspondent.’ ” Concludes Richburg: “If the Post job hadn’t come along, he’d probably be some top assistant to Murdoch on Asia.” Brauchli’s old friend Stuart Karle urged him to embrace the private sector: “I told Marcus he should go work for Goldman Sachs in China. He’d make himself a pile of money. The guy knows everyone in China. He loves journalism enough to stay in it.”
The Washington, D.C., area, Don Graham told me with satisfaction in 2002, is “a hell of an area to publish a newspaper in.” (See “Stability: Don Graham’s Washington Post,” CJR, September/October 2002). But the good times didn’t last: the Post Company’s annual report for 2007 highlighted a significant drop in classified advertising, and noted: “the newspaper business is slipping.” The newspaper division posted an operating loss of $193 million in 2008, and $164 million in 2009. Daily circulation of the print edition is now about 556,000, down from 830,000 in 1994. Today, the Post employs fifteen full-time foreign correspondents, down from twenty-four in 2001. These days, Graham lives with the words of his grandfather, Eugene Meyer, which are inscribed in the lobby of the Post: “In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.”
The Post’s financial distress cast a shadow over the race to succeed executive editor Leonard Downie, who was installed by Don Graham in 1991. When Katharine Weymouth became publisher of the Post in 2008, she decreed that Downie’s time was up. Today, many people at the Post contend that Downie “bungled the succession”—as if Downie was not an employee of a public company, but an African dictator who could name his successor. Walter Pincus, a longtime Post reporter and a consultant to The Washington Post Company, speaks for a number of his colleagues when he says: “Downie had made sure there was no successor, because he didn’t want to leave.”
The leading internal candidate for the executive editor’s job was managing editor Philip Bennett, who embodied many of the paper’s best values and who maintained an ambitious conception of journalism’s possibilities. Bennett’s detractors faulted him for lackluster communication skills, and accused him of playing favorites in the newsroom. Pincus says: “I think Katharine felt she gave Phil a chance, but he was not a leader.” Several Post veterans told me that Bennett would have pushed back aggressively against some of Weymouth’s edicts. In the end, Weymouth chose a man with no institutional history at the paper, and with no work experience in Washington.
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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