Will The Washington Post Survive?
Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander’s column on Dan Froomkin ends with the observation that “With his loyal followers, he’ll survive. So will The Post.” I’m not certain that the Post won’t survive, but like Brad DeLong I don’t think it makes a ton of sense for Post employees to be that confident that the paper will survive either.
The Post employs a lot of people, and a lot of those people are very good. But if you think about a highly-competitive digital marketplace, it’s not obvious to me that the thing as a whole is nearly good enough to survive. I think it’s clear at this point that most American newspapers are too small to survive in traditional newspaper form—people will presumably continue to want news about Cleveland and about Ohio, but they won’t also get their national and international news from that local news source. The New York Times works as a fully globalized English-language news media outlet. So does the BBC, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and maybe a few others. Is the Washington Post in that league? Maybe, but maybe not.
You could imagine a very pared-down version of the Post competing with Politico and Roll Call and The Hill and National Journal and CQ as offering niche non-ideological coverage of Beltway politics. But do we really need five publications like that? And would something scaled-back to that level really count as The Washington Post we know today? I don’t think the answers to these questions are totally obvious. Dan Froomkin, by contrast, pretty clearly will survive.
42 Responses to “Will The Washington Post Survive?”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
June 27th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
It’s not even clear the NYT will survive.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
You know MattY has been in Washington too long when he refers to The Politico and The Hill as ‘non-ideological’.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Small papers will go first because the efficiency of local advertising on-line is simply too great. Consumers rely online for market information about local stores, they will be doing so from now on. So, advice to local reporters, get on line and stay there as soon as possible. If the local reporter is good, then on line ads will soon follow.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Ironically, you can imagine a global niche for the Post as the primary outlet covering the U.S. government (as distinct from just covering Beltway politics). Which is ironic because that was precisely the market Froomkin was supplying.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Why, the Soviets had Pravda and Izvestia, and the Americans will have NYT and WaPo. The official line has to be formulated and published somewhere for local apparatchiks to know what it is, and one official organ is probably not enough for a large country like the US.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
It’s not even clear the NYT will survive.
The brand will survive, but it might get bought by GE or Google eventually.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Why, the Soviets had Pravda and Izvestia, and the Americans will have NYT and WaPo. The official line has to be formulated and published somewhere for local apparatchiks to know what it is, and one official organ is probably not enough for a large country like the US.
Ha, ha—Nailed it!
June 27th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Will the “discourse of objectivity” survive? How about genuine factuality?
You’ll recall that while the Post’s op-ed pages in the run-up to the Gulf War Sequel (more of a sprawling epilogue) seemed to contain more than its share of entrail reading and Hunnish delirium its news pages included some good, probing reporting; is the opposite, represented by the Times, really better?
June 27th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Consumers rely online for market information about local stores, they will be doing so from now on.
Online “shop local” efforts have been notorious failures. Maybe there have been successful ones (other than CL, which is sort of different) that I don’t know about.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Survive? Just survive? That’s not much of a mission for a newspaper that once had ambitions to be a great, international newspaper.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I think that the Washington Post will survive because of the wealthy demographic in the Washington DC area.After all , advertisements is how newspapers make most of their money.I know that advertising is taking a hit . But it is still a very good area to advertise for a wealthy and educated demographic.That’s probably why there is still a DC Examiner while the Baltimore Examiner failed and went out of business.
But in less affluent towns some newspapers will either fail or be a shell of their former selves.The Baltimore Sun is a perfect example.It’s sad to see what it has become. You almost want to see it put out of it’s misery.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Indeed, it’s a good area to advertise for a wealthy demographic, but if the demographic doesn’t want to buy your paper, it might be difficult to do.
A better solution may be to have it as a money-losing division of some huge quasi-government corporate entity (like GE or something) that may use it to apply pressure on politicians and as a propaganda tool. You know, to manufacture consent and stuff like that.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
The Post is in trouble and maybe behind the curve vs. the Politico but I think some of the commenters are correct. All newspapers are in trouble. The new model will be more like the papers that existed in the beginning of the republic. Small, opinionated and cheap to publish. The big conglomerates will not be able to compete because of the lack of advertising revenue available.
June 27th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
“Small papers will go first because the efficiency of local advertising on-line is simply too great.”
Actually, as a small paper veteran, I think you’ve got it wrong. Small papers are in comparitively better shape because they don’t rely on national advertising and national classified as much as big papers.
And advertisers in small markets have been (and are) slower to adapt to the changing world.
June 27th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
“Is the Washington Post in that league?”
Yes, but only because the league is failing with them. It’s like being flushed out of a toilet from an airplane. You’re falling just as fast as the crap around you. All the time you can say you’re better than that crap. But when you hit the ground, it really makes no difference. You’re just a pile of organic material. You may be a prettier red, but that’s not much of a consolation, is it?
In the end, we’ll just have local reporters posting on their blogs. And I don’t see any problem with that. It’s not like “real” reporters were ever objective anyway. The only thing they had to offer was boots on the ground. And that can be done more efficiently with local bloggers. And it’s already true now. The Burnt Orange Report covers Texas better than any newspaper can. Granted, if you want to know what bands are playing, you still have to read the Austin Chronicle. But that’s online too. Reporting will never die, newspapers will.
June 27th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
By becoming the virtual house organ aggressive conservatism the Post has guaranteed its survival. I am surprised the Times hasn’t closed down yet but I suspect it will soon so resources can be concentrated at the Post. Or perhaps maybe a merger is in the cards. They will have to get Moons name out of it however.
Speaking of which. Isn’t he going absolutely bonkers over the events there now?
June 27th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
What about Gloria Gaynor? Will Gloria Gaynor survive?
June 27th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
The WSJ is no longer a news source, it is just a collection of opinions. Of course the WSJ’s days are limited. Who needs it?
June 27th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Nobody “works the refs” better than the Neocons and Republicans. All they have to do is accuse a newspapaer of “liberal bias” and the editors fold like a lawn chair and hire more rightie columnists or rightie commentators. As Eric Alterman (among others) points out, THERE IS NO LIBERAL MEDIA. And the Post just proved it again. Shame on them.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
What the internet has done is dramatically lowered the “barriers to entry” for new journalistic ventures to enter the fray. Before the digital age, there was no Politico, no Huffington Post, no DailyKos, so the competition for the post was only from other print media. Now the pressure has been ratcheted up a hundredfold.
Still, European newspapers manage to live, thrive, and survive. Anyone scanning a newspaper stand in a European train station will see a vast array of fat, ad-filled, feature-brimming daily newspapers, usually printed on much higher quality newsprint than their US counterparts… The internet age hasn’t seen any of these papers shrink, disappear, decimate themselves or fade into oblivion.
European newspapers are not treated as “profit centers” or “investment properties”. Though usually designed to make a profit from selling ads, profit is not considered their raison d’etre. These are enterprises run by journalistic professionals, not MBAs and corporate bean counters; reporting and filling a public need for information are the raisons d’etre of European newspapers.
How easily we slip into misunderstanding of this, beclouded and befuddled as we are with our US-centric, money-centric thinking.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Politico is non-ideological?
June 27th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
The Huff. Post needs to grow up. The Post, and the Times, will be there a lot longer than the Huffington Post, especially if the Post has to start paying for the content it is stealing.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
It strikes me as odd that Matt seems to say the Post is more likely to disappear than the NYT. The Times’ financial problems certainly seem more serious than the Post’s to an outsider, and if you are using journalistic malpractice to make your predictions, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller are worse than Froomkin’s firing. Froomkin’s firing was certainly a mistake and indicative of the dire straights all newspapers are trying to navigate, but I don’t know why he’d say that the Post is the most likely of the three major nationals to shrivel up based on that alone.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
“Non-ideological reporting” is pompous and wrong. The Washington Post is a reliable mouthpiece for the interests of ruling circles in Washington. It can always be counted on to trot out the party line on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, unions, etc. Its demise would only eliminate one form of “ideological reporting” — and certainly not the kind worth mourning.
June 27th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
There seems to be an assumption here that all anyone gets the Washington Post for is political coverage and commentary. What kind of blinders do you go through life wearing?
June 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Thanks for the stupid column. The Washington Post has literally hundreds of thousands more readers than this irrelevant blog that was luckily picked up by HuffPost.
Your two seconds of fame are up now. Back to obscurity you go now.
June 27th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
[...] Via Matt Yglesias, the Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander weighs in on the firing of Froomkin: [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
The Washington Post is worthless and will not be missed. WashPo is a hack’s refuge, where writers go to shill for corporate America. Good riddance.
June 27th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
The Post was an accessory to the Bush lies that killed our countrymen and left our economy in ruins. It failed in journalism’s primary mission to reveal the truth. Good riddance to The Post and the hacks that inhabit it.
June 27th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
I used to check the Post website daily and read their op-ed columns. However I have tired of George Will, David Broder and the like who seem to offer nothing. It seems that I don’t visit very often. If I am typical, bad news for them.
June 27th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
The WaPo and NYT are the Izvestia and Pravda of our country. Just as a previous commentator mentions. It is much more interesting and fun to speculate why the East Coast intelligentsia feel obliged to believe any sort of BS as long as it is published in the one or the other.
June 28th, 2009 at 12:09 am
The Washington Post will be just fine. The vast majority of the Washington Post company’s income is totally unrelated to either the newspaper or Newsweek. They own Kaplan, the tutoring and test prep company, and this provides an insane amount of money. They own six TV stations that are all network affiliates, and those still make good money. I suspect that the newspaper aspect of the company will continue to decline and lose money, but with all the other shit they own, particularly Kaplan, they’ll be able to afford to publish for many decades to come.
June 28th, 2009 at 12:48 am
The Post is a diversified company, much more so than other newspaper companies. The largest chunk of $$$$ has come from education — Kaplan, Inc (including Kaplan Test Prep and Kaplan Higher Ed). Kaplan has done wonders for the post. If they and the other divisions of the company remain profitable, the Post can survive…so long as the paper doesn’t hemorrhage too much dough.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:51 am
“people will presumably continue to want news about Cleveland and about Ohio, but they won’t also get their national and international news from that local news source.”
Awful sentence, wouldn’t get past Wapo editors…
June 28th, 2009 at 2:16 am
I lost all respect for the Washington Post when it became “All Bush All the Time” during the run up to the Bush Administration’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraqnam. The Post refused to reign in or even question its egomaniacal “reporter” Bob Woodard and basically gave an open influential microphone to Bush through Woodard. Because of that incident I hope the Washington Post does not survive. Selling out in the name of access cost them all of my respect.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Anyone here actually know anything about the Washington Post?
‘The Washington Post newspaper is an operating division of The Washington Post Company. The Company is a diversified media company whose principal operations include newspaper and magazine publishing, television broadcasting, cable television systems, electronic information services, test preparation and educational and career services. Company headquarters are in Washington, D.C.’
http://www.washpost.com/gen_info/corporateinfo/index.shtml
It is possible that people here are using Post owned cable systems to access the Net, or watch Post owned TV stations. As is generally the case with DeLong , don’t actually expect anything resembling insight to come from his decrying aspects of the the power structure he exists in (tenure for torturers is necessary to ensure that tenure protects anyone who holds it) – the Post is exceedingly likely to distribute information over multiple paths as long as DC remains a center of political power. The paper is not that major part of the corporate group, a fairly obscure fact – that is, the revenue from the broadcast and cable system divisions is more than that of the paper itself, and these 3 together don’t equal the revenue from the Post’s ‘educational’ division – http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=62487&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1139009&highlight=
And what many people forget, much of the value of the Post, in a political context, comes what the Post knows in terms of collected information, but then decides to withhold or use to what purpose the Post deems worthy. The Internet has been reducing this power, as rumors and facts become much harder to control, but no politician in DC is unaware of the fact that the Post is likely to have a much clearer view of that politician’s life than would be comfortable if placed on public view.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:40 am
Matt,
You consider Politico and National Journal as “non-ideological”? Wow, I’m very surprised. I can’t see anything except the standard pompous “consensus” view in either of them. In other words, milquetoast Republicanism.
No, they’re not frothers but they both buy into the standard corporate elitist bushwa that rejects any governmental activity not blessed by the Federalist Society.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Save some trees; close the “Post”.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:10 am
If the Washington Post fails to report, who cares if it fails? If its writers fail to even define the terms, or the who what when where of the story, who cares if they keep their jobs? For instance, Ceci Connolly fails to define the term “public option” but maintains that it is unpopular with all but outsider liberals and is causing huge problems for Democrats in congress. Connolly refers to polls without the numbers, and Democrats without names, and writes what is false:
Evidence please:
Name please:
This article is typical of the New Washington Post – no evidence, facts backwards, no name sources, cutesy sneering, bias in favor of the conventional wisdom of small town D.C. and getting the politics wrong. Who really cares if this paper goes down?
Health-Care Activists Targeting Democrats, Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/ceci+connolly/
June 28th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
@mattyoung: Not sure what you mean by “small papers [being] the first to go.” If you mean papers in rural areas and towns of less than 100,000, you are mistaken. Most are still sound, and many are thriving, because they have few competitors for local advertising dollars (typically, one or two small radio stations are the only alternative for advertisers); and high-speed Internet hasn’t come to these markets, making online media less user-friendly. Cutbacks in rural circulation by papers in nearby metro areas also removes competition for rural/small-town papers.
The first to go, as we’ve seen in Seattle and Denver, are papers in medium-sized markets where there are/were more than one local paper. The next to go will be papers and chains that are overleveraged with debt. And then we’ll get to the real nut-cutting: the failure of medium-market papers whose customers won’t accept downsizing and degrading of the product.
The first of those to go will be in markets close enough to big cities that a major paper is a viable alternative to the local one — especially if the major expands its regional coverage. (The better The New York Times’ coverage of northern New Jersey gets, for example, the shakier the Newark Star-Ledger becomes.)
The big newsroom of the future will be an operation that effectively combines the staffs of local papers and TV stations, with contributions from local bloggers and “community journalists,” into a medium whose primary outlet is a Web site, with print and broadcast supplementing or digesting the online product.
June 28th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
If the Post expands its personals section, and opens its pages to escort services and 900-numbers, it may compete with the likes of the City Paper or Village Voice. But even then, The Post post-Froomkin, will lack a writer with the talent and wit of the Voice’s Roy Edroso.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
And where, pray tell, will we get actual coverage of actual local DC news? The Currents? Come on.
What @Jake Alexander said.