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The Next Editor of the Washington PostWho should it be?

By Jack ShaferPosted Tuesday, May 20, 2008, at 6:32 PM ET

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Jack Shafer volunteered to assist the New York Times in picking its public editor. He also suggested candidates to replace Bill Safire on the Times op-ed page. In 1997, he reviewed Katharine Graham's autobiography. In 1998, he caught the Washington Post swapping identities with the New York Times. In 2005, he sized up the Washington Post Co. when it bought Slate and found it and its leaders to be fantastic.

Downside: Both would regard the job as a demotion.

Chuck Todd: Washington is a company town. The company town's business is politics. The Post is the company town's newspaper, so you could do a lot worse than hire Todd, NBC News' political director and this year's Mark Halperin. He was also the long-time editor-in-chief of the Hotline, which indicates managerial experience. He's platform agnostic, understanding print, TV (which is just the Web with fewer options), and the Web. He's a workaholic, as this Howie Kurtz profile illustrates, and only 36, which in and of itself would send a signal to the newsroom if he became editor.

Downside: Would the Post be comfortable with a former presidential campaign worker who married a Democratic consultant?

Jill Abramson: Abramson is one of the best journalists in the business, and I don't say that just because she used to listen to me when we rode the Orange Line from downtown D.C. to Arlington together in the old days. She's run stuff (Legal Times in D.C. and the Times Washington bureau), and she excelled at the Wall Street Journal, where she rose to Washington deputy bureau chief. I have no reason to believe that she could successfully fuse the dotcom and the paper Post into a brilliant single thing except faith—and the fact that she got run over by a truck in 2007 and the truck lost.

Downside: Too perfect a candidate (see also Dean Baquet). And besides, she couldn't be talked into the job, as she expects to succeed Bill Keller as executive editor of the Times.

Jacob Weisberg: Experienced journalist? Check. Check. Check. Understands the Web, knows how to run a publication, is a known quantity to the Graham family? Check. Knows his way around writing a book? Check. Check. Knows how to be goofy? Check. Rhodes scholarship? Check. Understands the ruling class? Check. Declined membership in Skull and Bones? Check. Understands politics? Check. Tolerant of massive pains in the neck? Check. Expansive view of the Web? Check. Check. Determined? You have to ask?

Downside: I'd have to break in a new editor of Slate.

Others worthy of inclusion are Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes; James Bennet, former Timesman and current editor-in-chief of the Atlantic (don't hate him because he used to be a foreign correspondent!); Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and founder of Talking Points Memo; John Battelle, founding publisher of the Industry Standard, a co-founding editor at Wired; former Los Angeles Times and MacWeek guy; chairman of the Web business Federated Media Publishing; Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. Last, we're all going to work for Brian Stelter eventually, so why not get it over with?

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I've got other names, but I've run out of time. Who would you like to see edit the Washington Post? Send your candidates to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Stelter in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to .