ON a Sunday in early December, Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post,
summoned some of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists to a lunch
at his home, a red brick arts-and-crafts style in the suburb of
Bethesda, Md.
He asked his guests, who included the Pulitzer Prize
winners Bob Woodward, Dana Priest, David Maraniss and Rick Atkinson,
along with Dan Balz, the paper’s chief correspondent, and Robert G.
Kaiser, a senior writer and editor who has been with the paper since
1963, to help him — and The Post.
...
Mr. Brauchli refuses to be held hostage to the past. “There are a lot of
nostalgia-drenched people in the journalism field who look back at what
newspapers were and have a fairly static view of what they should be,”
he said in an interview. “Just because The Washington Post used to be a
certain way doesn’t mean The Washington Post has to be that way in the
future.”
The Post faces the same problems as other daily newspapers, whose
revenues have sunk as the Web and the tough economy have sapped
advertising. But in some ways, its situation is even more daunting.
Unlike most other papers with national aspirations, The Post serves a
purely local print market, one that for decades had limited competition,
and it has depended on local advertisers and subscribers who have since
fled to the Web.
Though company managers say privately that The Post is modestly
profitable, its newspaper division, which also includes a group of
community papers and The Herald of Everett, Wash., reported an operating
loss of nearly $26 million through the first three quarters of last
year....
That has left the newspaper and the company’s other businesses exposed.
The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stands at less
than 640 people, depleted by buyouts and staff defections. The
newspaper’s Style section, once one of the most coveted assignments in
American journalism, has shrunk from nearly 100 people to a quarter of
that size. Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are gone. There
were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing
employees last summer that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t
overlap.
“The survival of the institution is not guaranteed,” Mr. Kaiser said in
an interview before the December lunch. Over the course of his
five-decade career with The Post, he has been a summer intern, a metro
reporter, a foreign correspondent and the No. 2 to Len Downie, Mr.
Brauchli’s predecessor.
... Mr. Brauchli has reacted to the upheaval by overseeing one of the most
sweeping and closely watched reorientations of any newsroom in the
country. The editors now stress online metrics and freely borrow from
the playbooks of more nimble online competitors like Politico and The
Huffington Post...
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