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Two Cheers for Newsroom BuyoutsThe good news about the bad news coming out of newsrooms.

By Jack ShaferPosted Monday, April 7, 2008, at 7:11 PM ET

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Last month, Jack Shafer saluted the streamlining of the editing process at the Washington Post. In January, he decided that newsrooms needed more booze and cigarettes, and in 2006 he announced that newspapers are dying but the news is thriving.

"There goes our institutional memory," somebody usually laments whenever a graybeard leaves a news organization. The speaker is usually another graybeard who, if pressed, couldn't tell you what is so vital about the institutional memory wheeling out the door. If institutional memory has any real value, it's been written down or passed down. It's not locked up in some geezer's head. Not all on-the-job experience brings wisdom that translates into better coverage, especially the experience that's used to protect turf as opposed to breaking news. When institutional memory impedes newsroom progress, it deserves a good erasing. At the Washington Post, the brass is currently degaussing its editing process so it can rescue the paper from the bureaucratic excesses of the industrial era and drag it into the electronic.

The stereotype driving this column—Veteran journalists! Get out of the way!—is blunted by longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas B. Edsall. Edsall took his paper's 2006 buyout and has thrived outside its confines, with a teaching position at Columbia University's J-school and assignments from an array of top publications. In May 2007, he became political editor and writer at the Huffington Post.

Edsall doesn't want to minimize the difficulties others may have faced since taking the buyout, but he says his post-Post experience has been "a great ride" and that the Huff Post people are "excellent … with a sense of mission and a go-for-broke spirit."

I've enjoyed Edsall's Huff Post work on the campaign trail more than anything he's done in his career. He seems to feel pretty good about the work, too.

"Stories I wrote got published the way I wrote them—no editorial bureaucracy. ... After working at heavily edited publications all my life, this was like being born again," he says via e-mail.

Or maybe Edsall shows that the old horses have lots of go left in them—they just need new riders. Should the Washington Post hire him back?

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