Four things the Washington Post’s new editor can do to avoid disaster

gigaom reporting:
Now that the election is over, much of the talk in Washington media circles is likely focused on the other momentous change that has taken place: namely, the appointing of a new editor for the venerable Washington Post. While Marty Baron’s appearance at the Post isn’t fraught with the same amount of tension as former BBC director Mark Thompson’s arrival as the new CEO of the New York Times, he clearly has a tough climb ahead of him — the Post‘s circulation has been crumbling, and its financial picture is fairly dismal as well, and getting worse by the day.
So what should the new editor do to try and right the ship? Put up a paywall like everyone else? Lay off a few hundred more staff to try and cut costs? Buy something shiny that can give the Post some online credibility? Here are a few things I think Baron needs to do if he is to avoid disaster:

Figure out what the Post wants to be

This is probably the hardest question that Baron, the former editor of the Boston Globe, is going to face — next to the ever-present paywall one, of course. As media blogger Erik Wemple notes in one of his columns about the paper (which he writes for), the Post has literally spent years debating whether it should be a regional paper for Washington and the surrounding area, or whether it should try to challenge the New York Times for the national and international market.
There are arguments to be made for both: the Post is to some extent hamstrung by its past glories, including the famous Watergate scandal, and can’t seem to give up the idea that it is a national or even global player. And perhaps it shouldn’t. But the reality is that there’s probably a far better business opportunity — advertising-wise, at least — in focusing on serving local readers rather than trying to match the NYT for national and foreign reporting. The point is that the Post has to pick one, and dive headlong into that market, rather than trying to do both at the same time, because that road leads to perdition.

Commit to the anti-paywall strategy


Publisher Katharine Weymouth and CEO Don Graham have both talked openly about how they don’t believe a paywall will serve the paper or its readers, for a number of reasons — primarily because they appear to believe (as I do) that the benefits of remaining open and free outweigh the short-term financial benefits of putting up a paywall. But it’s not enough to just make the occasional comment about how this seems like a good idea: if the Post is going to get its staff on board, it needs to be shouting this philosophy from the rooftops in the same evangelical way that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger does.
The reality is that the Post looks like the odd man out when it comes to paywalls, and the consensus that seems to be emerging — pushed by the Columbia Journalism Review, among others — is that it is going to fail because it is fiddling while Rome burns. If Graham and Weymouth believe that this isn’t the case, then they need to embrace the idea of open journalism as much as The Guardian has and double down on that strategy: release an open API, make videos about their passion for openness, launch some ambitious crowdsourcing projects, etc.
One thing the Post could do is to try and build a membership-based or “reverse paywall” approach, the kind that was suggested by its former managing editor Raju Narisetti (now at the WSJ).

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