The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Three ways to save the Washington Post: A few ‘Post Apocalypse’ musings from Alexandria

My old friend used to han­dle some PR mat­ters for a union in North­ern Vir­ginia, and peo­ple still pick his brains. Here’s a rule near the top of his list. Don’t waste too much time try­ing to get into the Wash­ing­ton Post, even on the most news­wor­thy sto­ries. L Street prob­a­bly will just ignore you.

Sim­i­larly when an obit­u­ary dissed local his­tory and I com­plained, the Post ombuds­man would not even acknowl­edge receipt of my e-mail. The obit writer had at least given me the cour­tesy of a short expla­na­tion. But no more details came. Hmm. Wasn’t ombuds­man Andy Alexan­der him­self wor­ried about the Post’s aloof­ness? Yes, I gave him Web links—from this site—which hun­dreds and per­haps thou­sands of surfers had clicked on. Is Mr. Alexan­der really Net-blind enough not to e-mail me even a few words?

The above two exam­ples came to mind as I read a New Repub­lic piece with the cheery head­line of Post Apoc­a­lypse: Inside the messy col­lapse of a great news­pa­per. Actu­ally the Post’s con­tin­ued decline is not inevitable, and as a decades-long reader of the paper, I’d like L Street to thrive. Here are three par­tial reme­dies, over­lap­ping some­what with Gabriel Sher­man’s TNR piece, but far from entirely. The first idea would help deal with the Post’s snob­bery prob­lem as well as with the sheer arro­gance that the retired union man and I have been up against.

1. Stop Slate-izing and Politco-izing the Post. Mem­bers of the Amer­i­can élite are not the main local read­er­ship; teach­ers, project man­agers and GS-13s are. They want to read of issues affect­ing them directly. Even the most over­paid lawyers and lob­by­ists need to know more about such mun­dane mat­ters as garbage collection.

The Post might even con­sider an Ivy League quota—a max­i­mum per­cent­age of of such peo­ple hired—and more empha­sis on intel­li­gence and per­for­mance as opposed to cre­den­tials. This could apply espe­cially in the era of the Net when skill at using search engines may count more at times than whether Reporter X knew Pub­lic Offi­cial Y at Har­vard. Snob­bery at the Post is hardly a new phe­nom­e­non, of course. But it might be lethal when so many gifted peo­ple are kept out of the Ivies sim­ply because their fam­i­lies can­not afford them. What happened—at least in regard to jour­nal­ists’ fam­ily backgrounds—to the goal of eco­nomic diver­sity? That’s the real solu­tion, as opposed to an Ivy League quota.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that the Post become the Duluth News Tri­bune, by the way; in fact, just the oppo­site. I want higher stan­dards fit for a wired era and the newspaper’s readership.

2. Go hyper­local but in an effi­cient way that does not siphon too much money and too many peo­ple from the Wash­ing­ton Post—so that it can still com­pete in national and inter­na­tional areas. The Post needs to tap the power of blogs, forums, wikis and other social media far more than it has.

The biggest prob­lem in local news, as illus­trated by my friend’s frus­tra­tion, is that the Post doesn’t run enough of it. L Street could. And iron­i­cally, raw infor­ma­tion from the masses just might help tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism; the Post’s star writ­ers would be in closer touch with local real­i­ties. The failed LoudonEx­tra didn’t offer enough pre­cisely tar­geted news from enough locals.

Per­haps Chevy Chase, home to Katharine Bouchage Wey­mouth, the Post’s pub­lisher, could be where the Post kicked off a renewed hyper­local effort, so she could see for her­self whether her people’s efforts were up to snuff.

3. Rec­og­nize that online and offline are to a great extent sep­a­rate worlds despite over­lap­ping read­er­ships; con­text is all. Many peo­ple online want up-to-the-minute break­ing news and a more inter­ac­tive approach pack­aged in an easy-to-use way. The New Republic’s Sher­man cor­rectly griped about the paper’s print­cen­tric pri­or­i­ties. I can’t nav­i­gate the Post’s Web site nearly as eas­ily as I can the New York Times’s; oh, how I hate hav­ing so much infor­ma­tion tucked away in that Byzan­tine bar at the top of the page. The mate­r­ial below the bar is a chaotic mess. Rely­ing so heav­ily on the nav bar, the Post Web site is prob­a­bly hell on many older peo­ple and other non-video-games players.

A bet­ter mobile edi­tion, mix­ing strong inter­ac­tiv­ity with the supe­rior pre­sen­ta­tion in the Times’s own mobile ver­sion, would also help. So would the Wash­ing­ton Post equiv­a­lent of the New York Times Reader for those who want a break from reg­u­lar Web brows­ing and who hate the Post’s cur­rent desktop-and-laptop reader as much as I do. The Times Reader jug­gles text around, so you don’t have to mess as often with zoom­ing and other tech-related distractions.

On top of every­thing else, the Times makes it eas­ier for me to iden­tify the sto­ries that count (because of their pop­u­lar­ity or rel­e­vance to me). Add that to the Times’s sub­stance and abun­dance of con­tent, and I find myself spend­ing more time with the NYT than the paper right in my backyard.

Of course, break­ing news isn’t enough; the Times in fact teems with won­der­ful, in-depth fea­tures. I know that the Wash­ing­ton Post is short staffed, but per­haps the Post could devote more money to free­lance con­tri­bu­tions, includ­ing some from bought-out reporters. Using more mate­r­ial from non­stan­dard sources might also be a pos­si­bil­ity, as long as the Post took time to avert the trans­parency and bal­ance prob­lems that Andy Alexan­der laud­ably wrote up (here’s to praise when deserved!).

My three sug­ges­tions are not the only ways to save the Wash­ing­ton Post—which still has many first-rate peo­ple left—but they would help.

A dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive: How to Save the Wash­ing­ton Post or any news­pa­per for that mat­ter, from the Sopho­more Critic.

Update, Jan­u­ary 31: John Sei­den­berg, a D.C.-area writer, cites the above Scan­dals post along with a sum­mary of the New Repub­lic arti­cle and reac­tion from the Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review.

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