http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=13758&ic=Off+the+Record
A New D.C. Paper Poaches, Encroaches Cross-Platforms
By: Michael Calderone
Date: 11/27/2006
Page: 6
Allbritton Communications, which owns seven ABC affiliates, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., now wants to own a newspaper.
A newspaper? Didn’t everyone write those old, unprofitable things off?
Allbritton’s paper, a tabloid called The Capitol Leader, will have a circulation of between 20,000 and 30,000, according to Frederick Ryan Jr., Allbritton’s president. It will be published three days a week, though only once a week during Congressional recesses. The majority of its readers—Capitol Hill staffers, lobbyists, that sort of crowd—will receive a free subscription. There will be newsstand sales, and also paid subscriptions. Designer Lou Silverstein, formerly an art director for The New York Times, created a template for the newspaper.
The Capitol Leader will debut in January, along with the new Congress. Allbritton once owned The Washington Star, which shuttered in 1981.
The Capitol Leader is paired with an as-of-yet-unnamed Web site. The paper and the Web site will be run out of the same office, by essentially the same staff. The main newsroom for both will be located in Allbritton’s television facility in Arlington, Va. There will be a smaller news bureau on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.
“Obviously, you have to have synergy,” said Jim VandeHei, one of the multi-platformed project’s first big hires. (The endeavor, in addition to its Web-friendliness, also has an agreement with CBS on the national level.) “Everything that will be in the paper will be online. All of the people, the stars that we bring in, will be in that paper.”
To staff the startup, Allbritton approached The Washington Post’s political editor, John Harris, a 21-year vet of the paper. They recruited Mr. VandeHei shortly before the midterm elections. Mr. VandeHei was not particularly interested in leaving his job.
“I have one of the coolest jobs in journalism,” Mr. VandeHei said he thought at the time. “Why would I give it up for this?”
Mr. VandeHei told his recruiters that he’d need a big budget to come over—that he’d hire a half-dozen top reporters at a salary “way above what reporters would make at The New York Times and Washington Post.”
There were more demands. They would have to hire six more “rising stars” in political journalism, and have the resources to fly reporters about on the campaign trail with their mainstream-media rivals.
Allbritton went for it. Mr. Harris and Mr. VandeHei went to talk to their Post bosses.
The Post “came back with an unprecedented offer for us to stay,” Mr. VandeHei said, an offer that included positions leading the newspaper’s online political coverage.
Washington Post managing editor Philip Bennet declined to comment on personnel decisions or The Post’s counteroffer.
“We have a really successful, dynamic presence on the Internet,” Mr. Bennett said. “It’s a huge part of the future of the newsroom. It’s embraced by everyone from [publisher] Don Graham to our most recent reporting hire. The idea that one would have to leave The Post to have a career that involved a lot of innovative online journalism doesn’t ring true to me.”
“The distinction between old media and new media is false,” Mr. Bennett said. “The Washington Post, like The New York Times, is in new media. We do it all day long.”
Mr. VandeHei said new-old media types have come clamoring. “I have e-mails from journalists begging for jobs,” he said. “I don’t want to use names, but they are people that you know.”
One Post staffer said the news of the dual departure, compounded with a vague but menacing belt-tightening memo sent on Nov. 14 by editor Len Downie, was “distressing.”
“There is no better place to write about politics than The Washington Post, and they’d rather go to a Web venture. That is pretty scary for the future of journalism,” the staffer said.
Or is the future just too bright?
“I think we’ll show that we’re better than The New York Times or The Washington Post,” Mr. VandeHei said.
“I’m a little bit skeptical that this is enough to launch,” said a D.C.-based political reporter. “It’s two good reporters, but that only takes you so far. You’re competing against giants with just so much institutional leverage.”
Was that leverage, or just baggage? “You can turn a small speedboat faster than an aircraft carrier,” said Mr. Ryan.
“We’ll only attract people who are at a point in their career where they want to start something new,” Mr. Harris said. “There’s a lot of people who are like me, coming up on mid-career, who recognized the world as we know it just doesn’t exist any more. The world of journalism that I came into in 1985 is changing.”
“I’m 43,” Mr. Harris said, “so I’m sure there will be a lot of 23-year-olds to help.”
“I’m hoping that we’ll have the flavor of working for the college newspaper, where everyone pitches in,” he said. He noted it “will be a lot better funded than a college paper.” And: “It’s not going to be Wayne’s World,” he said.
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/mediapolitics/2742.html
Key Defections Knock Post out of the Lead in Political Coverage
By Harry Jaffe
Loss of Harris, VandeHei, and Von Drehle puts Post at a strong disadvantage
One of the great rivalries in Washington political journalism is over—at least for now: Victory to Brand X, as the Washington Post refers to the New York Times.
With this week’s loss of Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris to a web-based news venture, the Post barely can field a team in the political arena. Add David von Drehle’s move to Time magazine and the Post has lost the core of its political coverage as the 2008 presidential begins to gather momentum.
The New York Times, meanwhile, seems to be getting stronger.
Veteran Times White House correspondent David Sanger just moved up to be chief Washington correspondent. John Broder has returned from Los Angeles to cover politics. Jeff Zeleny recently left the Chicago Tribune to join the Times and now covers money and politics.
“I’m not going to take pleasure from good people leaving the Post,” says Times bureau chief Phil Taubman. “I have great respect for the paper. The better the Washington Post is, the better the L.A. Times is, the better the New York Times will be.”
But at least for now, the New York contender will be much better.
The Post can still go head-to-head with the Times in congressional coverage. Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray make a formidable duo against the Times’ Carl Hulse, David Kirkpatrick, and Kate Zernike. And the Post can still play even in White House coverage, with Peter Baker, Mike Fletcher, and Mike Abramowitz up against Jim Rutenberg and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Dan Balz at the Post matches up with Adam Nagourney at the Times as the top political writers.
But the competition ends there.
The Post has no match for Robin Toner, who can cover anything well. Anne Kornblut has the Hillary Clinton beat. The Post has no one.
Did I mention Mark Liebovich, who the Times lured from the Post earlier this year? Von Drehle was supposed to fill Liebovich’s political beat in the Style section—until he moved to Time. And Tom Edsall was the Post’s experienced hand in covering money and politics—until he took the recent buyout.
Liz Spayd, who has overseen the Post’s political coverage as assistant managing editor since 2000, is leaving her job to become editor of washingtonpost.com. With Harris and Spayd gone, the Post has to break in two editors to run political coverage.
Add to it all that the Post's star political essayist Dana Milbank is sidelined on book leave.
“It’s [Dan] Balz and Baker and pray for rain,” said one former Post writer.
The drain from the Post—and other newspapers—might have just begun. Allbritton Communications, which is starting up the Internet-focused political news organization that has taken Harris and VandeHei, also has offered a contract to Post writer Chris Cillizza.
Cillizza works for washingtonpost.com, writing a blog called The Fix, but his stories often appear in the print newspaper, and he is often held up as a model of the kind of reporter the Post seeks to hire and promote.
VandeHei, a national political reporter, and Harris, the Post’s political editor, seem to have started a stampede toward the Internet. Writers from the L.A. Times, USA Today, the wires, the Post and television news operations have inquired about jobs at the new online venture.
Neither Harris nor VandeHei said they left the paper because they were unhappy with their jobs or the direction of the paper and its web site.
“Jim and I are eager to be associated with something new and build it from the ground up,” Harris told The Washingtonian. The Allbritton venture—the Albritton family once owned the Washington Star newspaper and still owns WJLA-TV, the ABC outlet in Washington—will include a web site focused only on politics. It will be affiliated with The Capitol Leader, a new Capitol Hill newspaper scheduled to start publication in January. Harris and VandeHei also will have a partnership with CBS News.
Harris and VandeHei took their idea for a new political web site to the Post, and the Post was interested in creating such a venture.
“That was one option,” says Harris, who has been at the Post for 21 years. “We thought long and hard about it. At the end of the day, the appeal of starting something wholly new, where we could make decisions and have influence from the beginning, won the day.
“It’s not impossible to accomplish this within an established institution,” he says, “but it is harder. What we are doing is riskier but potentially more rewarding.”
No matter how the paper spins the loss of Harris, VandeHei, and von Drehle, plus Edsall and Liebovich, it seems clear that the Washington Post is no longer the preeminent source of political news in Washington. The L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal have strong political teams. USA Today can depend on Susan Page, long time bureau chief; Kathy Kiely and Andrea Stone covering Congress; David Jackson on the White House; Jill Lawrence for national politics; and investigative reporter Pete Eisler.
In their memo announcing the defection of Harris and VandeHei, Post executive editor Len Downie and managing editor Phil Bennett ended by professing a desire to “increase the number of readers for whom The Post is the essential guide to American politics.”
Given the paper's losses this year, the essential guide is now the New York Times.