http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=12031
Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 11/21/2006 2:13:51 PM
Title: Blame Downie?
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
From TREVOR BUTTERWORTH: Rem Reider is right to say that the departure of Jim VandeHei and John Harris is a "crushing blow" to the Washington Post, but he misses the salient point: this is a failure of management and leadership at a newspaper rather than a cypher for technological change and the news business.
No company can survive without cultivating and keeping talent. Leadership, as Jack Welch has tirelessly pointed out, is finding the right people for the job, nurturing them, and giving them the opportunities to do more and to do better. The Post has a website, possibly the best day-to-day coverage of national politics of any publication in the U.S., a formidable brand name and - despite its current economic woes - huge resources, so the departure of two of its top journalists suggests an extraordinary lack of imagination, flexibility, and management skill in conceiving and executing the mission of the newspaper. All of which concurs with the jibes one hears in journalistic circles in Washington about the Post foundering in entrenched mediocrity.
Perhaps Leonard Downie did everything he could to keep his reporters
at the paper. But to the world, it looks like the kind of failure that normally precedes a change at the top. [Permalink]
Someone seems to think there's a limited amount of "talent" out there, and that's just not true, at least not at this level. There may only be a small number of people who have the potential to turn into the next David Brinkley or H. L. Mencken - the sort of person whose writing is so good that you can practically tell who it is from the first two sentences - but there's tons of people who are simply good reporters, and these two are in the latter category.
My guess is that no readers will even notice that these two have jumped ship. FR is loaded with political junkies, who ought to make up some of the Post's most hardcore readers. If we did a poll, I'd bet only 5% of Freepers would even know who VandeHei is, and that's only because his name is so unusual.