But a former Post foreign correspondent with a sharp eye says: “There are just large subjects that they just don’t seem to deal with. They still have reporting power and talent that surfaces regularly in the A section and that makes itself indispensable. But it’s around selected subjects or it’s an ad-hoc surprise. The daily range of the paper’s confidence is noticeably reduced. And on international coverage they’re just not trying to cover the world every day anymore.”
The departure of Anthony Shadid, who joined The New York Times in January, left a hole in the Post’s foreign coverage. Shadid, forty-one, is the premier American foreign correspondent of his generation; his reporting for the Post from Iraq garnered two Pulitzer Prizes. “Anthony loved the Post more than anyone I know,” says Karl Vick, who now works for Time. “For him to leave it was such a staggering blow” to the institution.
Colleagues say that Shadid was deeply dismayed by the way his mentors—Philip Bennett and David Hoffman—were pushed out by Brauchli. (Hoffman, it turns out, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize nine months after he left the Post for his book The Dead Hand; Bennett teaches at Duke.) Moreover, Shadid came to feel that his technique—which entails prodigious reporting, lyrical writing, and deep skepticism of official sources—did not conform to Brauchli’s Washington-based vision. “The Post is a great paper,” Shadid said in July when I phoned him in Baghdad. “I think it will probably figure out what it has to do to survive. But the paper I joined in 2003 is not the paper I left in 2009. I say that as a foreign correspondent. It’s a paper that was about Washington in the end.” Shadid declined to discuss specifics. (The Post continues to lose gifted foreign correspondents: Steve Fainaru, a Pulitzer Prize winner, left in March, and Philip Pan, the Moscow bureau chief, recently announced his departure.)
Of the Post’s foreign coverage, Karl Vick says: “You still see good enterprise reporting from the war zones. You don’t see much of the rest of the world in there anymore.” Bill Keller says, “Bless them for continuing to take foreign coverage seriously, but it hews more closely than before to stories that fit a Washington agenda, which sometimes has the odd effect of making the Post’s world feel like an appendage of the State Department.” The emphasis on Washington means there is less room for quirky and human-interest features from abroad. “You’re seeing a lot more stories about policy,” says Keith Richburg. When the Post was edited by Downie and Steve Coll, the paper’s former managing editor, long, finely crafted stories were common. “Stories are coming in now at twenty-five or thirty inches,” says Richburg, “that used to routinely come in at forty or forty-five or fifty.”
When Post staffers are asked to describe the Brauchli era, they often use words like “chaos,” “reorganization,” or “time of transition.” Karl Vick offers a vivid example of chaotic political coverage. In January, Vick happened to be visiting the main newsroom in Washington, on break from his post in Los Angeles, when Scott Brown’s campaign began to surge in Massachusetts. An editor informed Vick they needed someone to cover the campaign; he agreed to do so. Vick recalls: “There was nobody on the ground. There was nobody who wanted to do it! This is supposed to be the nation’s premier political newsroom! And the L.A. reporter happens to have a weekend free. They sent him up! I was just amazed. To me, it spoke to no bench.”
I asked Thomas B. Edsall, who spent a quarter century covering politics for the Post, to assess the paper’s political coverage under Brauchli. “It’s not good to be dependent on Stanley Kaplan,” Edsall replied, referring to the testing and education firm that delivers substantial profits to The Washington Post Company. “If a newspaper is not making money, it loses self-confidence. Cowardice begins to set in. People are afraid of taking strong steps. As revenues began to decline, the aggressiveness of the Post also began to decline.”
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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