The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

9Aug/100

Free paper copy of ‘The Solomon Scandals’ if you come up with the best replacement for ‘L Street’ and ‘WaPo’

image A Wash­ing­ton Post alum enjoys The Solomon Scan­dals blog but won­ders why the devil I use “L Street” when refer­ring to the Post. After all, isn’t the paper at 1150 15th Street, N.W.?

Well, once upon a time, the Post’s offi­cial address was in fact 1515 L Street. And, maybe in trib­ute to Lon­don­ers’ old “Fleet Street” nick­name for the press, the “L Street” ref­er­ence found its way into the Post news­pa­per some years ago. What a great link between the tan­gi­ble and the jour­nal­ism I grew up read­ing; a neigh­bor of mine even helped put out the edi­to­r­ial page. That is how “L Street” ended up in the Solomon Scan­dals blog. Some might say the street ref­er­ence con­tin­ues to work. Think of a par­al­lel. Cer­tain writ­ers still say Fleet Street when refer­ring to the Lon­don press despite the actual news­pa­pers’ hav­ing moved on. It’s a lit­tle like men­tion­ing K Street when talk­ing about Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ists’ turf after the actual firms have relo­cated elsewhere.

imageIn this era of vid­cams and Net-enabled hyper­local news, how­ever, I need to mod­ern­ize. The story I have from one Post employee, as well as a sec­ond, in pub­lic rela­tions, is that the Post phys­i­cally com­prises at least two build­ings joined together. When the Post put up the sec­ond with a more impos­ing front, among other advan­tages, the loca­tion was on L Street rather than on 15th. The Google map charm­ingly pre­serves the ves­tiges of the 1515 L Street address—well, assum­ing we can believe it, not always the case (scroll down this post for a scary story about the risks of out­dated or incom­plete elec­tronic maps). Got it now? But where does that leave me? I still need a sobri­quet for the Post—my child­hood read­ing, not just cur­rent jour­nal­is­tic fare—even if it’s a news­pa­per rather than a human and the edi­to­r­ial page is too neo-con these days for a guy reared on the old Post in the L Street era.

image So here’s the deal. The reader of this blog who comes up with the best sub­sti­tute for ”L Street” will win a free paper copy of The Solomon Scan­dals (warn­ing: salty city-room lan­guage and req­ui­site cyn­i­cism, although the news­pa­per involved is most def­i­nitely not the Post). I mean some­thing good: there’s a cer­tain QC thresh­old you must cross. “15th Street,” for exam­ple, some­how lacks the same ring of “L Street.” Maybe writ­ers sim­ply pre­fer let­ters over num­bers. And for­get about the oft-used “WaPo.” Sounds too much like an intel­li­gence agency or util­ity com­pany.  I’ve used it, but only for want of some­thing bet­ter. Email me at davidrothman@pobox.com. Other than mem­bers of my fam­ily or indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­ated with Twi­light Times Books, any­one on Planet Earth may enter, Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pany peo­ple included, past and present, from Don­ald Gra­ham on down. Deadline—how’s that for a news­pa­per word?—is 5 p.m. East­ern Day­light on August 31.

Note: Just to be clear, this is not in the least an offi­cial Wash­ing­ton Post con­test. I have no busi­ness con­nec­tion with the paper other than hav­ing free­lanced for L Street occa­sion­ally in the dis­tant past.

(Updated to address the “WaPo” issue. Also, I’ve extended the dead­line for con­test entries.)

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
You might also enjoy:
31Jul/102

Gore sex probe dropped in Oregon: A NONscandal, without sufficient follow-up in the Washington Post and Politico

imageSkimpy lit­tle items in the Wash­ing­ton Post and Politico, on the end of an Ore­gon inquiry into the sex charges against Al Gore, didn’t do jus­tice to the ex-VP.  Given the seri­ous­ness of the charges and Gore’s promi­nence, wasn’t he worth more than those pathetic follow-ups? Check out a  far more detailed AP report in USA Today and other cov­er­age.

Among other things, Gore’s accuser flunked a lie detec­tor exam and Ore­gon inves­ti­ga­tors did not find the sup­posed sem­i­nal fluid that the licensed masseuse said had stained the pants she was wear­ing dur­ing the alleged inci­dent. While other women have made sim­i­lar accu­sa­tions against  Gore, might the copy­cat phe­nom­e­non be at work here? See ear­lier post­ing in this blog. Some­times “scan­dals” aren’t scan­dals, except in the sense that the inno­cent get besmirched.

Other Post news: I’m delighted that the Post has just appointed a “national inno­va­tions edi­tor.” Con­grats to the serendip­i­tously named Mark S. Luckie, author of the 10,000 Words blog and The Dig­i­tal Journalist’s Hand­book. Despite the “national” in his title, here’s hop­ing that the Post will also pay atten­tion to him on local and hyper­local issues.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
You might also enjoy:
19Jul/102

How Washington Post and New York Times could outgun hyperlocal sites like TBD and Baristanet

image imageIn 2004 Baris­tanet—the lively hyper­local net­work that helped inspire sim­i­lar oper­a­tions in sev­eral states—started writ­ing up pic­nics, schools and other neigh­borly news in Essex County, NJ.

Some five years later, The New York Times set up shop with blogs for Maple­wood, Mill­burn and South Orange, all in the same county.

Last month one of the two hyper­local nets said good-bye to its read­ers and gra­ciously offered a Web link to the other people’s site. No, the farewell didn’t come from lit­tle Baris­tanet, one of whose co-owners is Deb­bie Galant (photo below), a for­mer New Jer­sey colum­nist for the New York Times.

imageimageBoth online and in an inter­view with On the Media, the Times goliath did its best to down­play the shut­down, depict­ing the year-old New Jer­sey Local sites as an instruc­tive exper­i­ment, which  in fact it had been all along. What’s more, the Times is con­tin­u­ing hyper­local efforts in the Fort Greene and Clin­ton Hill sec­tions of Brook­lyn, in part­ner­ship with the CUNY Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, and it also will be work­ing wiith New York Uni­ver­sity on The Local: East Vil­lage. Fur­ther­more, Deputy Metro Edi­tor Mary Ann Gior­dano told OTM that the Times might pick up con­tent from other people’s local blogs—perhaps Baristanet?—if they met cer­tain stan­dards. Still, do you really think the Times would have closed its New Jer­sey Local blogs if the Essex County exper­i­ment had taken off?

image What the devil hap­pened? Any lessons here for the Wash­ing­ton Post to learn from the Times’ hyper­local shut­down in New Jer­sey? The Post has already chalked up a hyper­local fail­ure in Loudoun County, VA, and now faces com­pe­ti­tion from TBD.com, a hyper­local startup over­seen by Jim Brady, the ex-editor of Washingtonpost.com. In cer­tain ways might this be a repeat of what hap­pened when two L Streeters left to start the Politico, now a sta­ple on the White House’s daily read­ing list? Here’s another twist. TBD’s owner is Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which had fam­ily ties with the late Wash­ing­ton Star and owns WJLA-TV and NewsChan­nel 8, with which TBD will be team­ing up.

imageHow, then, can the Wash­ing­ton Post’s edi­to­r­ial and busi­ness sides pro­tect L Street’s fran­chise as the main local news source for the D.C. area? TBD aims to cover the news and make money, not destroy the Post, just as tiny Baris­ta­nent won’t exactly kill off the New York Times. Still, in the aggre­gate, inde­pen­dent hyper­local oper­a­tions could siphon off a notice­able amount of rev­enue from Post– and Times-style news­pa­pers, espe­cially if they can draw read­ers and adver­tis­ers from a whole metro area as TBD intends to. Let’s ana­lyze what may have hap­pened in Essex County, then pon­der how the Post might fare bet­ter next time it goes hyper­local. Many of my thoughts may also apply to the Times, which, after all, is still com­mit­ted to hyper­local experiments.

In my opin­ion from afar, here’s why Baris­tanet still thrived but the Times failed to score big with its hyper­local net­work in Essex County:

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Continue reading
You might also enjoy:
16Jul/100

Coming: How the Washington Post and New York Times could cope with TBD and other hyperlocal networks

Update, July 19: This should prob­a­bly be online by 7 p.m. East­ern Day­light tonight. Lots to say! – D.R.

image Hey, did you think I’d stop at How TBD could use hyper­local jour­nal­ism to kick the Wash­ing­ton Post’s butt? The strat­egy ideas for the Post will appear here over the week­end or on Mon­day. The same con­cepts might be use­ful to the New York Times. Yes, I can see TBD per­haps going national if it’s suc­cess­ful. My goal for this series is to help com­peti­tors think of all the angles in striv­ing for sus­tain­able jour­nal­is­tic and busi­ness models.

Mean­while check out upbeat and not-so-cheery write-ups of Main­Street­Con­nect, a hyper­local network.

Update, July 17: Speak­ing of the NYT, check out the hyper­local seg­ment of this week’s On The Media.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
You might also enjoy:
9Jul/104

How TBD could use hyperlocal journalism to kick the Washington Post’s butt

Update, Aug. 19: TBD’s cur­rent cov­er­age is a long way from what I pro­pose below. The Alexa Web traf­fic mea­sure­ment ser­vice is hardly sci­en­tific, and besides, TBD has just started up; but if the ser­vice on the mark, the new site is far from an instant suc­cess. I lack access to TBD’s inter­nal stats. – D.R.

imageMy first edi­to­r­ial in my high school news­pa­per called for a traf­fic light at Gum Springs Road and Route One near Alexan­dria, VA.

You see, my school bus chugged along that way. And I could eas­ily imag­ine an over­grown truck smack­ing into it, maybe right where I was sit­ting. But only after pas­sion­ate pleas did my alarum reach print. Why bother with such a tri­fle? Didn’t stu­dent gov­ern­ment count more as a topic? Safety risks be damned.

My high school edi­tors from decades ago might as well be run­ning the local side of Washingtonpost.com today. The Post is stel­lar in many ways at the national and inter­na­tional lev­els, but not as a hyper­local or even local news source for the fast-growing sub­urb of Alexan­dria.

And I sus­pect that many other D.C.-area res­i­dents find Washingtonpost.com to be as sub­limely use­less for them as a home­town paper. I myself spend far more time nowa­days read­ing the New York Times than the Post.

With­out decent local cov­er­age, and with chaotic Web nav­i­ga­tion com­pared to the Times, what’s the point? A gap­ing hole exists for com­peti­tors to fill.

So TBD.com—the local Web start-up owned by Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and tied in with the company’s WJLA-TV—could con­ceiv­ably use geo-targeted Web pages and other strate­gies to kick the Post’s butt at the local level. I’d also sug­gest a mix of more Web savvy, local and hyper­local data­bases and crowd-sourcing (even, with due pre­cau­tions, in the tricky area of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism). The right busi­ness strate­gies wouldn’t hurt, either.

Washingtonpost.com offers an Alexan­dria page, but much of this home­town news first appeared days ago, includ­ing the June 26 account of sex charges against a 72-year-old T.C. Williams high school teacher. Would you believe, that’s the news item at the top of the screen­shot above, taken today, July 9. The next antique down is 5 North­ern Vir­ginia men con­victed on ter­ror­ism charges, given 10 years in prison. They’re from near-by Fair­fax County, where I grew up, and the date on that one is June 25.

tbdlogoMiss­ing from the top of the Alexan­dria page is Fair­fax board to revisit plans to trans­form Bai­leys Cross­roads, a story dated July 8, just yes­ter­day. For civic-minded Alexan­dria res­i­dents along the Fair­fax County bor­der, all kinds of ques­tions arise about the 530-acre plan. Will Alexan­dria share in the eco­nomic ben­e­fits? What about the traf­fic, air pol­lu­tion and per­haps spill-over peo­ple mov­ing into Alexan­dria itself rather than Fair­fax County? Another bur­den on Alexan­dria pub­lic schools? Or is this a Good Thing? Should every­one cheer, and should Alexan­dria get ready to pig­gy­back on the Fair­fax effort? Bet­ter in the end for prop­erty val­ues and qual­ity of life? Within the Post’s Vir­ginia sec­tion online, as I write this, you will find the Bai­leys Cross­roads story, but it’s under­played, even con­sid­er­ing it’s lit­er­ally yesterday’s news; and why the devil can’t it also show up near the top of the Alexan­dria page? This is the Web, Ms. Wey­mouth and Mr. Brauchli, not print.

image Now imag­ine TBD let­ting read­ers choose an Alexandria-focused online edi­tion that would link not just to the Post story and those in other papers such as the Alexan­dria Times and Alexan­dria Gazette Packet, but also to blog­gers pas­sion­ate about their neigh­bor­hoods. And sup­pose there could be forums and com­ment areas in the actual TBD edi­tion, with sim­i­lar mate­r­ial linked or directly repro­duced from affil­i­ate blogs in my city? Instead of the Post broad­cast­ing the news to me, so to speak, TBD would be serv­ing up a truly community-oriented and com­pre­hen­sive site that blended news and dis­cus­sion, far more skill­fully and com­pletely than does Topix.com.

On the pos­i­tive side, TBD is wisely cement­ing rela­tion­ships with sports blogs, hob­by­ist blogs, hyper­local din­ing guides and other spe­cial­ized sites, the very kind of nar­rowly tar­geted con­tent that so many adver­tis­ers could poten­tially cher­ish, espe­cially if TBD skill­fully aggre­gated the good­ies. On the neg­a­tive, will this by itself really be good local jour­nal­ism? You also need to report civic news, like development-related top­ics, and that’s a chal­lenge when so many local blog­gers are dri­ven by nar­row pas­sions and don’t want to write about their neigh­bor­hoods per se—just about din­ing there, for example.

TBD will either have to hire more than the approx­i­mately 50 staffers planned for the start, or try even harder than now to find the right local bloggers—or per­haps it can start or buy par­tial inter­ests in local blogs or use a mix of these approaches.

Yes, to TBD’s con­sid­er­able credit, it already is try­ing to offer detailed local and sub­stan­tive cov­er­age. When I last checked, just 22 or so of the blog­gers were using a civic– or gen­eral neighborhood-oriented approach. Since then TBD has added at least sev­eral more blogs within that cat­e­gory,  not just hobby blogs, and efforts are ongo­ing. But for now we’re still not talk­ing about cov­er­age of civic affairs as thor­ough as I have in mind.

One par­tial solu­tion would be for affil­i­ates to turn to invite read­ers to send in heart­felt hyper­local com­men­tary and even videos. Look at the above YouTube and the explana­tory arti­cle from New York City’s West­side Inde­pen­dent, about which I wrote on July 2 while dis­cussing TBD and the civic blog­ging issue.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , Continue reading
You might also enjoy:
Page 1 of 3123
Sus­pense, a news­pa­per, and a rick­ety high-rise

“Same dark zeal Ham­mett held for Frisco or Chan­dler had for Los Ange­les.” — Wash­ing­ton City Paper

Buying info and other basics

Vis-à-vis real life

Newest comments

Recent Posts

Topics

Older posts

Blogroll

Meta

Tag Cloud

Abraham Ribicoff Allbritton Communications Ben Bradlee Beth Solomon books Charles E. Smith corruption D.C. David Bruce Smith David Rothman General Services Administration Georgetown GSA hyperlocal hyperlocal journalism Jim Brady journalism Katharine Weymouth Lorain Journal Lorain Morning Journal media newspaper newspaper business newspaper novels newspapers new york times Northern Virginia novels NYT Quinn Bradlee Robert H. Smith Sally Quinn scandals Skyline Plaza Solomon Scandals TBD TBD.com TBD blog network The Georgetown Dish The Solomon Scandals VA Virginia Washington Washington Post Washington Post Company