NEW YORK TIMES Column: … In terms of strategic plans, The Post remains where it was when she took over, only smaller. The major business thrust has been to lust after the sexy economics of aggregators like The Huffington Post and hope to re-engineer the newspaper into something similar. But The Washington Post is not in that business and never will be.
In the meantime, it has allowed its franchise on political coverage to disperse to other news outlets, many online, like Politico. The newspaper remains free on the Web, and its wait-and-see attitude on online subscriptions has left it on the sidelines. And by hewing to a strategy of local dominance rather than entering the national competitive fray, The Post now finds itself sharing a destiny with struggling regional newspapers.
The Post retains a toehold on its former greatness by virtue of its family ownership — its election coverage showed significant muscle — but those dynamics are now hard against an age that requires decisive, confident leadership. The cushion of profits from other endeavors like the Kaplan education division are all but gone, and if The Post is going to endure, the motor of the enterprise will be the people who occupy what is still one of the most talented newsrooms in the business… (more)
EDITOR: The article also states “Print, and more ominously, digital advertising revenue is in decline, circulation is in a dive…” and that the Post employs around 600 journalists.
We have no idea how the Post can successful transition from today’s money loser to an Internet site with perhaps twenty journalists a decade from now.
We anticipate the the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today surviving into the distant future because they have a national and, in the case of the former two, an international readership who will pay for access. USA Today’s distribution is largely to travelers. (The Financial Times may end up eating the WSJ’s lunch.)
As great as the Washington Post has been and continues to be, its prime coverage is local and thus its potential Internet market is truncated.
We fear the columnist expresses the desperate hopes of those wedded to traditional print medium, philosophically modern day Luddites.
News on the Internet offers a fantastic opportunity for the taking. We doubt that today’s publishers will lead the change.
