White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Struggle To Save the Printed Word and the Challenge at The Washington Post

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The printed word is to be treasured.

Two decades ago, I would have written newspapers are to be treasured. But the morning newspaper of old — manufactured in a factory in the middle of the night, shoved onto a truck and trusted to a child for delivery — is largely over. It follows the demise of its predecessor, the afternoon newspaper. These fell to competition from television in the 1960s and 1970s.

The word nowadays is largely carried digitally, even though it might have the imprimatur of a print publication. All the really big names in print now have more virtual readers than traditional ones. These readers may never have the tactile enjoyment, the feel of “the paper” they read, but they read. Increasingly, I am one of those. 

I plow through The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I dip into The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. 

I also read — and this is an interesting development — a number of magazines which are de facto dailies. These include The Economist, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

The Economist is the only publication to which I have a digital and a paper subscription.

Much as I have loved newspapers down through the years, I am resigned to the fact there will be fewer going forward, and a generation of young people will find them more a curiosity than anything else.

But the importance of the written word hasn’t diminished. I make the point about the written word — and I distinguish it purposely from the broadcast word — because it has staying power.

I have spent my entire career working on newspapers and making television programs. It is words that are written on paper or online that last, that are referenced down through time.

Overnight television has an impact, but it fades quickly; the advertising industry has scads of data on this. The printed word — using that term to embrace words on paper and online — has staying power.

People often remind me of something I wrote decades ago. Few remember something I said on television years ago. Or months ago. But people remember your face.

My regard for the printed word brings me to The Washington Post, where the news staff is aligned against the owner, Jeff Bezos.

There are two issues here.

The staff feels that Bezos has sold them out to President Donald Trump and the forces of MAGA.

Bezos bought the paper without any interest in being a newspaperman, in enjoying the pleasures and pain of news ownership. He didn’t understand that you don’t own a newspaper like you own a yacht. 

A newspaper is a live, active, rambunctious and roiling thing. You have to enjoy the fray to own one. Hearst did, Pulitzer did, Murdoch did. You don’t retail words the way Amazon sells pizza crusts.

Not only must the newspaper proprietor deal with the news and its inherent controversies, but he or she also must deal with journalists, a breed apart, disinclined to any discipline besides deadlines. By nature and practice, they are opponents of authority.

The Post has been mostly untouched by Bezos, except for his decision to spike an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The staff took it hard. 

Bezos was undeterred and took what had become the billionaire’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to become, to staff fears, Trump’s liegeman, or at least to reassure Trump. Then Bezos got a seat at the inaugural.

Readers of The Post also took it hard and unsubscribed en masse. Thirty percent of those were among the critical digital subscriber ranks, indicating how political its readership is and just how difficult it is for the paper to please all the constituencies it must serve.

I was an assistant editor at The Post in the glory days of editor Ben Bradlee and the ownership of the pressure-resistant Graham family, under matriarch Katherine Graham. When I was at the paper, I was president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. The Guild negotiated what turned out to be the largest wage increase for journalists in any Guild contract. As I remember, it was 67 percent over three years.

Even so, the membership complained. The Post editors and writers are good at complaining with a high sense of self-regard. Len Downie, who was to rise to the executive editorship of the paper, declared, “King has sold us out.” 

It was a contract that benefitted both the management of The Post and journalism in general.

It was a loud reminder of how poorly journalists are compensated and how this affects the flow of talent into the trade. 

The driving force behind the contract from the union side was its professional head, the remarkably gifted Brian Flores and the equally gifted Guild chairman at The Post, John Reistrup.

Under Bezos, The Post first looked as though it would become a great force in the digital world, while the printed paper survived unspectacularly. Bezos clearly saw the digital potential.

But things unraveled and The Post started losing money. It lost $100 million last year.

It is still a good and maybe a great paper. But it needs to get its sense of mission back. That sense of mission can’t be at war with its owner.

The Post clearly would benefit from a new owner, but who has pockets deep enough and skin thick enough? It is a question Bezos and the querulous staff both need to ask themselves as the fate of the paper is uncertain.

Let’s Honor the ‘Thing’ of the Year

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By Llewellyn King

Many publications, following the lead of Time, name a “Person of the Year.” This year, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to Time, the criteria to be chosen is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

So at this year’s end, I think it is time for those who make those choices to add a co-equal category: things. Things change everything. They have throughout history, but with increasing rapidity in the last 150 years. And they do it more dramatically now than ever before.

The magazine’s first “Person of the Year” (actually, back then it was “Man of the Year”) was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He was hailed for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21 that year.

Huge and brave as Lindbergh’s flight was, it was the airplane not the man, that changed aviation.

People change the way we live, but so do things. We now talk about the “Internet of Things,” where our home and work machines are all connected to the Internet. With this connectivity, a farmer will plow his fields from the local diner; and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, will have his drones ring the doorbell when they deposit parcels.

The unfolding political year will have much sound and fury. Candidates will promise that if elected, they will change the country for the better. Yet technology might change us more. Ergo, we should have a “Thing of the Year.”

I hereby declare the Internet as the “Thing of 2015.”

Why now? Because this was the first year we stopped being aghast at the changes the Internet is bringing about and simply accepted them as a reality — just as 100 years ago, the automobile went from being a novelty to being part of the fabric of life.

This Christmas was the “Internet Christmas.” We bought more from Web retailers than ever before, and did not marvel at it. It is just “the way we live now.”

For holiday greetings, the Internet began to beat out traditional cards sent in the mail. E-mailing your greetings is less labor intensive, and easier to personalize. Next year, expect more e-cards. If I worked at Hallmark, I would be pushing for additional electronic products before cards become another quaint piece of Americana on display at the Smithsonian, like rotary dial telephones.

I have not welcomed the Internet over the years. I like things the way they were. But this year was seminal for me: I decided the Internet, even the “Internet of Things,” was OK.

Particularly, I like the way the Internet reaches out to the sick, the shut-ins, the truly lonely and the homesick. I can send Christmas greetings to family and friends in Austria, England, South Africa and Vietnam, as I have, from a little device balanced on my lap. Wow!

Yes, with the Internet, you and I can fly across the Atlantic faster than Lindbergh could gun his throttle.

Here are some things that might change your life more than any political figure in the year ahead:

1. A prototype of a driverless car may zoom down a test track.

2. Home 3D printing will spread — so if you break something, you can make a new one.

3. All your appliances and gadgets will start speaking to each other: Using your cell phone, you will be able to defrost a steak in your home refrigerator while you are at work; or you will be able to get a diagnosis by taking a selfie of your inflamed eye.

4. Your electricity may be generated on the roof of your house, and a robot may make your bed.

5. A whole new generation of rockets will offer space rides,

6. New materials, only one-atom-thick, may enable you to fold up your television set and put it in your pocket.

Forget the politicians. Better ask the “things” what is in store; they are starting to talk to each other, and I do not want to be left out of the society of things. — For InsideSources

Washington Post: Family Adieu

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Part of the problem with dragging the news business into the 21st century is that newspaper people are so damned conservative. That's right, conservative.
 
Most journalists who work in print may be liberal, but we are conservative about our own trade. We like it the way it has always been. Gruff editors hammered into us how it should be, and we have passed the hammer.
 
While magazines experimented with new ways of presenting their wares and developing new voices, especially in the 1920s, newspapers clung to the past. Horizontal layout – the headlines running across the page rather than sitting astride vertical columns – was considered radical enough.
 
Even the sensational papers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were sensational within bounds. They pushed the limits of content and veracity, but the concept of the newspaper was unchanged. The carved-in-stone rules of the trade were not challenged — like the one that says headlines must have verbs, and another that says the first line of a headline cannot end with a conjunction or a preposition.
 
The most revolutionary of American newspapers was probably The New York Herald Tribune. In its last decade, even as it was dying a decades-long death from extraordinarily poor management, it became a laboratory for new journalism with certifiable newspaper geniuses like David Laventhol, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Clay Felker. Working at the paper was like working for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater: great stuff was going on.
 
The Washington Post has had its share of dazzling reporters and columnists – and benefited from some of its Herald Tribune hires, including Laventhol, who created its much-imitated Style section. I was lucky to have worked for both papers.
 
The Post has shone in the coverage of politics, interpretative foreign stories and big investigative stories. Watergate gets the kudos, but there was good, even great, investigative work before and after that.
 
The Graham family presided over the Post in its golden period from 1954, when it bought its morning rival, The Washington Times-Herald, to 2000 to the present. It never achieved the global recognition that The New York Times enjoys, but it was a close second — and on many days, the Post was clearly the better newspaper.
 
The Washington Post Company, which is controlled by the Graham family and which owned the newspaper, is less of a success story.
 
While other publishing companies grew and prospered, The Washington Post Co. was less successful: After its acquisition of Newsweek in 1961, it faltered as a dynamic news entity, even though the newspaper was hugely profitable.
 
It failed to become a major player in television, athough it owned stations, failed to expand its magazine franchise and missed out on cable TV, which has been so important to the growth of old-line publishers Scripps Howard and Hearst.
 
The company bought and sold many properties on the fringes of its core business, but with little success, except for Kaplan Inc., which was very profitable until the student loan imbroglio.
 
Four years ago the Internet, like an invasive species, began choking the life out of the Post. It didn't know how to respond. It failed to create a credible Web site and watched two English newspapers, The Guardian and the Mail, build up huge Web presences in the United States. Helplessly, it also watched an upstart company, Politico, staffed with Post veterans, take hunks out of its political franchise. As recently as last year, the Post could not establish whether it needed a pay wall.
 
Now the Graham family, headed by Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive officer Donald Graham, has done something very brave in the egotistical world of publishing. It has admitted: We don't know what to do.
 
Jeff Bezos, the inordinately wealthy founder of Amazon, has bought the paper. Does he know what to do? Nobody knows.
 
Nothing Bezos has done suggests that he either understands or reveres newspapers. But he can afford to be radical and he is not bound by newspaperdom's reverence for the way we used to do it; our conservatism. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate