More Turbulence In Washington Media

November 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media 

This month has seen a number of shakeups in the world of Washington newspapers, which in recent years have been feeling the pinch caused by falling circulation, dwindling advertising revenues, and repeated staff cutbacks.

On November 16, the weekly Washington Blade, America’s oldest newspaper aimed at a gay audience, went out of business a month after celebrating its fortieth anniversary, when its parent company, Window Media of Atlanta, abruptly went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. No warning was given to the staff of 21, which learned of the paper’s demise when a Window Media employee phoned them to say the parent company’s offices had had its locks changed.

But, undaunted, the Blade staff got to work on putting out a new paper as soon as they’d moved their belongings out of their old offices, and the following Friday saw the first issue of DC Agenda. But the new paper faces the same questions its predecessor did about losing advertisers to the internet, and wooing readers from the generation accustomed to getting its news through a keyboard and screen.

This week, the Washington Post took another step toward ceding its status as a national newspaper to the New York Times. The paper announced that it was shutting down its remaining out-of-town bureaus in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and bringing the reporters posted there to DC. The plan is to send reporters outside Washington only when major news stories occur. But one has to wonder if anyone pointed out some simple facts to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. Suppose “the big one” really hits Los Angeles. Just how long would it take to get reporters into a city devastated by an earthquake? Would it not make more sense to keep one or two reporters in the city, so that they could begin reporting within the regular news cycle? 9/11 also comes to mind; in the days after the tragedy, it was extremely difficult for anyone to enter Manhattan.

Finally, there’s the turmoil at the Washington Times, the daily founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and operated (reportedly at losses exceeding $50 million a year) since 1982. Since Sunday, the paper has not published its usual comic strips and crossword. But that’s the least of its problems. Early this month, the paper’s president, Tom McDevitt, was fired; its executive editor, John F. Solomon (formerly of the Washington Post) quit; and in mid-November Richard Miniter, the Times’s editorial page editor, told Howard Kurtz of the Post that he had been fired from the paper (though it still lists him in its staff box) and that he was suing his former employer for discrimination, saying that he was coerced into attending one of Rev. Moon’s famous mass wedding ceremonies as a spectator.

A week ago, Joseph Farah’s World News Daily site (which has a number of contributors formerly associated with the Times) reported that more staff cuts are imminent and that the print version of the newspaper could vanish within sixty days, to be replaced (a la the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) by an online-only entity. It would be an unhappy fate for a newspaper which, though rarely reaching a circulation of 100,000 in a metropolitan area with several million potential readers, still managed to score with solid national-security reporting, mostly thanks to Bill Gertz, who might have received a Pulitzer had he worked for any other newspaper on that beat. (Not to mention its often-outstanding sports coverage and its excellent book reviews, especially in the days when its literary section was run by the late Colin Walters.)

It’s hard to know what’s going to happen next in the print world, but I’m hoping that there’s still some time to go before the days when my fingers are smudged with newsprint will be as bygone as the times they were smeared with the ink of a typewriter ribbon.

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