Big news today at The Washington Post, where political editor John Harris and star political reporter Jim VandeHei (and perhaps others still to be revealed) are jumping ship to join a new Web-centric serious politics site. The site will be built on top of the nascent Capitol Leader, a planned politics magazine.
But this is much bigger than that. There's serious money behind it, from Albritton Communications, and they've already lined up guaranteed appearances on CBS' Face the Nation.
This is a major blow to The Post (and The Post knows it), not just because the paper is losing two stars, but because the new site will be a major competitor in political coverage—an area WashingtonPost.com has always been a bit deficient in. Sure, Post.com had all of The Post's great political coverage from the paper, but the Web site really didn't go much beyond that beyond a couple of blogs. It let ABC News build a huge franchise with The Note and never really came up with a matching product, and years ago it killed its best effort to make a major play in online political coverage, PoliticsNow.
When your franchise is politics and you don't do everything you can to build on that on the Web, you leave yourself vulnerable, not only to competiton but to frustrated insiders heading out on their own to do it themselves. That's what's happening here. From the internal Post memo, it's clear that the newspaper and Web site have been put on a war footing—but they should have been building a great online political product years ago, not in reaction to today's defections. Jim Brady and Liz Spayd, who will oversee WashingtonPost.com's response, are great journalists (and old friends of mine), and they'll do a good job responding. But they're going to be playing catch-up, and doing it without a couple of key assets who just walked out the door.
This development also makes me wonder if there may be other, similar opportunities for deep, vertical Web startups in other subjects, based on hiring strong newspaper talent. Maybe a great arts site in New York? A Hollywood site in L.A.? Deep local sports sites? It's an interesting model, and it will be interesting to see if Capitol Leader proves to be a watershed for strip-mining newspapers to start alternative Web news sites.