It was only an offhand comment in a Washington Post editorial, nothing more. Its intent was to highlight the media’s failure to catch a mistake made by the Justice Department during the Supreme Court’s deliberations on child rape and the death penalty.
Aside or not, it offered a revealing glimpse into the author’s opinion of the blogosphere, and by extension what the Post regards – or does not regard – as its competition: “Blame the media, too; only after a legal blogger, Col. Dwight H. Sullivan, had pointed out the mistake did a newspaper, The New York Times, take note.”
To add insult to injury, the online version of the editorial did not even bother to link to Sullivan’s original post, even though it did link to the subsequent story in the Times. That certainly wasn’t because it was hard to find: thanks to the Google, it took me less than two minutes to find Sullivan’s blog, despite the fact that he blogs pseudonymously and I only knew his name.
Now far be it from me to disagree with the Post about the sloth of the mainstream media. In fact, I used to joke that if you wanted to find out what was going to be on this evening’s network newscasts, CNN, or NPR, all you had to do was read that morning’s Post and Times. And as Howard Kurtz (the Post’s media reporter) noted back in March 2007, many news outlets don’t even bother to cover stories until they appear in these two papers — even when other competitors manage to break a story first.
But these days, it is the Post that is looking increasingly lazy. Until recently, the Post was my main source of news, my first-thing-in-the-morning-must-read. Then, a few months ago, I decided to start my own blog. I began reading other blogs to get an idea of who was doing what.
I soon discovered that the stories I was reading in the Post had appeared online anywhere from 48 to 72 hours earlier – in other words, a period much longer than what could be excused by the challenges of publishing a daily newspaper in 24-7 news cycle. These days, I tell my friends that if they want to know what’s going to be in the Post tomorrow, they should go online.
Despite this, few of my friends have the time or inclination to read blogs (hey, wait a second!). Most are in their forties, and grew up getting their news from other sources. These are the Post’s primary audience: people who want to remain moderately informed but whether because of time constraints or technophobia, choose to rely upon old media for their reporting.
If they do go online, they tend to go to… the new media versions of their old stand-bys. Some of these sites, like that of The New York Times, are in fact quite good. Others, like that of the Post, suffer from bad layouts, fewer resources, and a management team that doesn’t really understand how new media works. But then again, most of their readership doesn’t understand it either — they just want the news.
There are millions of such individuals, willing consumers of WashingtonPost.com and other purveyors of old wine in new bottles. That they choose to get their news this way isn’t a big deal, but they are missing out on some terrific blogs and emerging online news sites (like, for example, The Washington Indpendent).
They also are coming late to more than a few big stories. Some of the best scoops of the past two years came from reporters who work exclusively online: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo broke the Justice Department/attorney firings scandal (work for which he won the George Polk Award for legal reporting), and Mayhill Fowler of The Huffington Post broke the story of Obama’s “bitter” remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser. Both stories received extensive coverage in the Post, despite their humble origins. Most recently, Dafna Lizner of ProPublica, which describes itself as an online newsroom, beat the Post to the story of the terrible track record of Alhurrah, the U.S. Government’s Arab-language television station.
The reality is that the Post treats blogs as a resource rather than competitors. If the Times scoops it, the Post reports that fact. But when an online outlet is first, the Post rarely bothers to give it credit — unless Howard Kurtz mentions it in the Style section.
The Post can’t afford to coast anymore. It has lost hundreds of thousands of readers over the past decade, mostly to online media. And numerous surveys have shown that under-40s don’t get their news from newspapers anymore.
This isn’t the first time that newspapers have faced such a challenge. Until forty years ago, many newspapers were published in the evening. Many cities — and not just big ones — had a morning paper and an evening one. Then, with the advent of the network evening news, every evening paper in the country either became a morning paper or went out of business.
Some in the blogosphere have speculated that the same thing is now happening to all newspapers. Can the Post and other “old media” outlets survive the fast pace of change that has come to characterize contemporary 24/7 reporting? I certainly hope so. I still like the Post — and I’d like it to become essential reading once again. And call me old fashioned, but there are few things more satisfying than drinking that first cup of tea in the morning while reading the paper.
This week, Katharine Weymouth, the forty-something Publisher and Chief Executive Officer of the Post, named Marcus Brauchli, the forty-something former editor of The Wall Street Journal, as the paper’s new executive editor. Each replaces a man in his seventies. According to Kurtz, who covered the story for the Post, one of the main reasons Brauchli was chosen was that he had successfully merged the Journal’s online and print news reporting operations. He faces a similar challenge at the Post, one exacerbated by geography: its print operation is located in downtown D.C. at the paper’s traditional home, while its online counterpart operates out of a separate facility in Arlington, Virginia.
Weymouth and Brauchli now must merge the two cultures, in the process making the Post more responsive to “internet time.” They also might want to consider sitting down with the editorial board and urge them to reconsider their opinion of what is and what is not media. As a recent Post editorial — the same one that looked down its nose at new media — noted, “it can be embarrassing, but the occasional taste of crow probably does more good than harm to the media’s credibility.”
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