I asked Narisetti to delineate the principal objective of the current regime. He says: “To take a print-centric newsroom of eight hundred people, give or take, and transform it into a smaller, but much more multimedia-centric, newsroom.” (“About six hundred” is how Brauchli describes the current size of the newsroom.) Narisetti believes that he and Brauchli have come close to accomplishing their mission. But a price has been paid: as part of the integration process, some of the most talented people associated with the Web site, starting with Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, moved on; Brady felt there was no place for him in Brauchli’s integrated newsroom. (Brady now works for the Allbritton-owned tbd.com, which competes against the Post on local news). Moreover, Brauchli had the newsroom redesigned, which resulted in months of hassles and headaches for Post staffers, who were forced to flee their normal workspaces. Newsroom morale plunged, though the mood is said to have improved since the construction ended.
It will take time for the dust to settle on the print-Web integration. “It still feels like two media organizations,” says Freddy Kunkle, a veteran reporter on the local staff. “It’s almost as if there is a blogging culture, an online culture, an online media organization that has been inserted into the host of the old print organization, and it’s kind of transferring its DNA, little by little, like a virus. A lot of folks who were on the print side are just not exactly sure where this is all going to go.” Kunkle adds: “Even among some of the younger writers, there is unease about the new standards, or lack thereof, for writing Web stories, and the superficiality of what passes for an updated blog post, and the quest for eyeballs.”
It’s Brauchli’s job to respond to that unease. But my reporting, which is based on more than fifty interviews with current and former Post employees, suggests that he has yet to articulate his vision clearly or win the full loyalty of his staff. Some sources used unflattering terms to describe him—“bureaucrat,” “cipher,” “organization man,” “undertaker”; some people find him aloof and secretive, though his allies say in his defense that his Swiss origins explain his contained personality. Before an audience he is said to be a tongue-tied disaster; he is apparently better in one-on-one meetings. Brauchli admits he has work to do: “I’m probably not in the newsroom as much as I should be,” he says. “My biggest weakness is that I don’t get to spend enough time with reporters.” Brauchli may have been a charismatic reporter, but he is not a charismatic editor. A distinguished reporter says: “He’s a failed communicator. He’s made very little effort to transmit his vision to the staff. He has no presence in the room in a larger sense. He doesn’t seem interested in news or the Washington area. Most people don’t understand why he’s here.”
How does the Post look two years after Brauchli’s arrival? First, it must be acknowledged that his task is enormous: to put out a first-rate product with fewer resources in a punishing recession and a time of rapid technological change. A comprehensive report card on Brauchli’s Post would require a separate article, but impressions can be formed. “The Post is still a good, serious, competitive newspaper,” says Bill Keller. In an e-mail to me on July 21, Brauchli outlined some of his achievements:
We’ve kept up a strong cadence of investigative work—into subjects like the misallocation of AIDS money in the District, the hazards of the helicopter medevac business, the Redskins’s ticket office; the lapses that led up to the Fort Hood shootings, and most recently the world we described in our Top Secret America series. We also have put in place terrific teams covering national security and politics, reporters who have pretty much defined the Afghanistan policy debate over the last year and brought our readers real understanding of the party schisms that are driving politics this year.
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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