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Post Exodus, Part II… as long as I'm on the subject.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006, at 6:35 PM ET

Ever written a piece and regretted it the next day? I don't mean regret as in, "I shouldn't have written that," but as in, "I wish I'd said more on the subject."

That's how I feel about my column from yesterday, "The Post Exodus," which attempted to place in context the defection of political aces Jim VandeHei and John Harris from the Washington Post to a new multimedia political-news organization. So, permit me the indulgence of a rambling sequel.

To my ears, the one-stop-shopping-for-political-news extravaganza promised in the Allbritton Communications press release reeks of oversell. Allbritton is a second-rate media company whose local station, WJLA-TV, isn't even the city's news leader. The Capitol Hill newspaper that it's about to launch, the Capitol Leader, is the third entry in that market (after Roll Call and the Hill). In an earlier incarnation, the company owned the Washington Star, which it unloaded on Time Inc. before it folded.

A sane media organization would be approaching the saturated niche of political coverage with some trepidation. Never mind for a moment the reams of conventional and often excellent coverage produced by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal (a shout out to David Rogers!), and the various Washington bureaus. You've also got the National Journal and Congressional Quarterly chasing the story, as well as Time, Newsweek, and the weakling newsweekly, U.S. News & World Report. On the Web, The Note and Hotline deliver the political skinny, Real Clear Politics aggregates the best of the best, and several squadrons of bloggers advance the story. Talking Points Memo and its shit-disturbing sister site TPMMuckraker show that politically identified journalism can rise above pure partisanship to break stories. Over on the right, Hugh Hewitt, PowerLine, and Redstate do similar—though not identical—service.

Second-rate news organizations can succeed for the reason that first-rate news organizations often fail. Does anybody remember the debacle that was Washington Post Co.'s Sport Illustrated knockoff, Inside Sports, which it unloaded in 1981?

Deep pockets that collect the best talent (which is the Allbritton strategy) don't necessarily guarantee success, either. In the early 1990s, the National, a national sports daily, poached some of the biggest names in sportswriting with big bucks as it ran through more than $100 million during its disastrous 17-month run.

Some of VandeHei's hype—which has earned him the abuse of Michael Sokolove—sounds like the sort of stuff people said when they breathed the gas emitted during the Web's first explosion. (VandeHei has since exhaled. See his attitude correction in Romenesko.) Does anybody remember Lou Dobbs' dramatic departure from CNN for Space.com, which he founded? While I congratulate VandeHarris.com for achieving escape velocity from their wage-slave positions at the Post and wish them light-speed success, I hope they've absorbed the Dobbs lesson. Back in 1999, as billions in Web investments burned brightly, even sensible observers like John Ellis caught the fever. In this June 10, 1999, Boston Globe column, Ellis writhed on the ground and wet himself in a Web-triumphalism seizure:

When Lou Dobbs, the consummate inside player, dispenses with the old model, the rules of the game really have changed. The battle for talent is being won by the Web. The challenge for traditional companies will be to reverse this trend. Money alone won't work. Corporate culture will have to change as well.

After a couple of years in orbit, where the only aliens he encountered were green and flew superior spacecraft, Dobbs returned to his CNN chair.

******

For the latest on Space.com, see this Forbes piece. Why are space aliens always green? Send your speculations to . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Remarks from the Fray:

Do their anonomice go with them? Or do they stay with the WaPo? Since inside the beltway political reporters cannot live without a fix of a good leak almost daily, to whom their leakers leak is an important question, and I, an outsider, have no inside information as to the answer.

If you're a leaker, do you want your juice spread all over the world or tucked away in some medium that only Jack Shafer and some DC types know about. Having a bit of news attributed to you as an anonymous source is a waste in a no name publication.

Sure, few appreciated Gore's invention when it first went online and maybe this publication – online or not – might one day be the go to source for political news or gossip, but if I, as a snitch, can't sing on the WaPo stage, then it's just not worth it.

Let's face it, if you are going to rat on the group that hired you, or your hidden agenda to advance your career by torpedoing others careers requires a larger audience, you got to stay with the WaPo. The disloyal have their own way of loyalty.

--scout29c

(To reply, click here.)

So they cash out, get associated with a failed enterprise and we're rid of them. Good news. Will the lords and masters of the Post replace them with actual journalists who actually ask tough questions of the administration? Could they promote Froomkin? Put him in charge of the Washington bureau and get some actual journalism happening? Will Lil Debbie go too?

As atrios would say, simple answers to simple questions: No.

I say "failed enterprise" because I've visited the site. It's poorly designed for the interaction they claim to be interested in. They won't be breaking news because they won't have enough page views to interest their sources. You have to build these things up slowly, like Josh Marshall has done. You can't start top heavy with no readership.

And we know, for sure, that they aren't interested in interaction with their loser readers. They could have interacted at the Post web site, and chose to delete negative feedback wholesale, disdaining the hoi polloi.

To me, this illustrates just how out of touch the people in the Beltway Bubble are. They think they're important. They think they're superior. They think they're special. They'll discover that exposed to an actual marketplace of ideas that these are all illusions--that all they had was byline in the Post. There's some poetic justice in the future discovery that all they had was the brand, given the damage they've done to that brand because of their gutless sycophancy to right wing whiners.

--BeowulfSchaeffer

(To reply, click here.)

(11/25)

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