Semi-News: Washington Post Struggles

AZCONSERVATIVE ^ | 23 March 2006 | John Semmens

[John Semmens]

Amidst declining circulation, declining advertising revenues, and rising newsprint costs, the Washington Post announced that it will eliminate some 80 newsroom positions over the next year. That’s close to 10 percent of its reporters and editors.

“An analysis of our business practices revealed that we weren’t using reporters to write our stories anyway,” said Preston Cash, assistant publisher for the paper. “Why pay for something we don’t need?”

Cash indicated that the basic structure for all future news stories already exists. “Our internal review showed that one basic theme ran through all our stories,” said Cash. “This theme can be plugged into a computer program that will generate all future stories. All we have to do is throw in a few specific topical anchors like ‘failed war on terror’ or ‘Bush blunders,’ stir in a few statistics or location names and the software will write the story for us.”

“Right-wingers say this isn’t news,” said Cash. “We say, if it’s in our paper it is news. After all, the Post is a newspaper.”

Skeptics aren’t persuaded that the Post’s strategy will work. “Relying on fabricated news may lower the Post’s labor costs, but it will do little to address the problem of declining circulation and ad revenues,” said Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center. “In fact, it’s likely to aggravate these problems.”