A Publisher Stumbles Publicly at The Post

By DAVID CARR

Katharine Weymouth, the relatively new publisher of The Washington Post, is a lawyer who worked for the company for 12 years and was educated at the Harvard School of Business, so she is hardly a naïf in running a business.

But she has never worked in a newsroom, a gap in her résumé that may have contributed to her current problems.

As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home in which officials from Congress and the administration, lobbyists and, yes, the paper’s own reporters could have a quiet, off-the-record dinner, discussions to be led by Marcus Brauchli, the newspaper’s editor. Theoretically, you can’t buy Washington Post reporters, but you can rent them.

I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time. Access, and its very close cousin, influence, define the Beltway. Millions of dollars are spent on having the right lobbyists, flacks and lawyers so that you can end up in a room with people who control your destiny.

And in some respects, the now-canceled salon on health care seems like an attempt to replicate a golden era for the newspaper in which a seat at a dinner hosted by Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post and Ms. Weymouth’s grandmother, was the hottest commodity in the Beltway.

The difference? Mrs. Graham bestowed legitimacy (Richard M. Nixon never made the cut, even as president). Ms. Weymouth decided to sell it, with her paper’s editorial integrity apparently thrown in as a parting gift.

Perhaps Ms. Weymouth’s notion came up a year ago when she, along with senior Web and print editorial staff members went to Harvard to rethink The Washington Post brand. In response to questions about the salon, Ms. Weymouth sent a reply stating, “I take full responsibility. We will be publishing a note to our readers on Sunday.”

That might do a world of good for the paper. Initially, the salon controversy — we won’t give it a “gate” suffix out of respect for the newspaper that established the term — was explained away as the unfortunate result of an unvetted brochure sent out by an overzealous marketing employee (later identified as Charles Pelton).

But, as The Los Angeles Times pointed out, at least two of the invitations to political participants, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, came from the personal e-mail address of Ms. Weymouth. Mr. Brauchli insisted that he had not realized the full implications of the events even though Mr. Pelton told The Post’s ombudsman that the plan was “well developed with the newsroom.”

The absence of a credible explanation, compounded a grievous wound to an important newspaper. The whole episode suggests a misreading of history that has been well covered by the paper but also, and perhaps worse, a tin ear to newsroom dynamics.

Let’s put this in context: Ms. Weymouth is confronted with the same crisis as every publisher in the country. The Web has robbed newspapers of paying readers and advertisers, the economic downturn is cutting into what is left, and smaller, nimbler Internet competitors are learning to slake the 24-hour news thirst on their own.

(The fact that it was Politico that broke this story only added to the sting. Started by two former Post reporters, Politico has become a serious competitor right on The Post’s inside-the-Beltway turf, and now has caught the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state. In the increasingly heated race between the mainstream media and newer, digitally enabled ones, much of the remaining competitive edge for legacy media derives from a perception that they adhere to more rigorous publishing standards. Oops.)

So Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli are under tremendous pressure to innovate, both to cut costs and to increase revenue. Unfortunately, neither arrive at this critical point for the industry with much equity in the newsroom they lead, because they are both relatively new.

Ms. Weymouth has some inherited good will in part because she leads an organization that is not only family-owned but is also operated like a family. When Donald Graham was the publisher (and Bo Jones, who succeeded him) and Leonard Downie Jr. was the editor, they were both viewed as tradition-bound — boring even — but they both observed The Post tradition of winning over employees, not bossing them around.

Before the salon problem, however, Ms. Weymouth had made a series of decisions that had — fairly or not — kept her own newsroom at loose ends.

Her 17 months as publisher have been a period of upheaval, including rounds of downsizing that left the newsroom and other departments considerably smaller. She also oversaw the merger of The Post’s print and digital newsrooms after years of turf wars. She has made public comments praising The Huffington Post for its clever headlines, a compliment that did not endear her to reporters who see their own work splashed on or criticized on the Web site.

And she was widely seen as hastening the retirement of the longtime top editor, Mr. Downie. She then hired Mr. Brauchli, an outsider, to run a newsroom that had historically rewarded its own with the top job.

Mr. Brauchli with a deep, impressive résumé, including serving as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, has worked hard to retrofit The Washington Post for a new era. Mr. Downie was viewed as something of a traditionalist in the Ben Bradlee vein, an editor who managed the newsroom by walking around, making friends along the way.

Mr. Brauchli is not a high-touch guy, unless you count his BlackBerry. He has had to oversee the sharp cuts in the newsroom — a task that falls on many editors — but he has done so while attempting a radical reorganization of the newsroom that may do wonders in the long run, but has been unsettling for many.

His explanation for the salon mess — I planned to attend but did not understand exactly what the party was — has not helped.

“I believe Marcus didn’t know that this was going out, I don’t believe he would have approved it,” said Deborah Howell, the former ombudsman for the paper who is now a consultant for Advance Publications. “But I don’t see anybody taking responsibility for it, either. I’d like to know, as a reader and fan of The Post, how exactly this happened and so far, I don’t know.” (Ms. Howell made her comment before Ms. Weymouth accepted responsibility.)

Ms. Weymouth’s initial explanation for the salon fiasco, also broke another Washington Post tradition: those who are handed the sword generally fall on it when trouble comes.

During Watergate, Mrs. Graham took a lot of heat — including outright abuse — from the Nixon administration. After the Janet Cooke affair, Mr. Bradlee, the former editor, took the blame himself.

Ms. Weymouth’s excuse — that the salon brochure “completely misrepresented what we were trying to do” didn’t track with many reporters, who have already been contending with cutbacks at the paper.

“Oh really? Then what were they trying to do?” said one reporter who did not want to be identified as criticizing the publisher. “Yes, we should be in the business of seminars and conferences, but the issue for us is fraught because we cover Washington.”

Hank Stuever, a staff writer, said, “Katharine should expect the journalists who work for her to be disappointed and upset about this and should also understand that the details so far have been unsatisfying.”

“The people I know in the newsroom are still waiting for a lot better answer to what the goal was here, what was really happening with this idea, and how it got so far along without raising red flags,” Mr. Stuever added.

The reporters, no doubt, are looking forward to the note in Sunday’s paper. But they are also staring down the prospect of serving as a punch line in Beltway circles for many years to come. The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has already obliged by wondering aloud at a news conference whether he could afford to take a question from Michael Shear, a Post reporter.

Funny stuff, unless you are the reporter with your hand up.

“Even if this was just an unvetted marketing blunder, The Post’s reputation has taken a huge hit in terms of the optics. When you have Robert Gibbs joking about it, that’s hugely embarrassing for the paper,” said Richard Leiby, acting arts editor of the newspaper.

It is true that reporters and editors in every newsroom chronically complain about the business side of the operation and that their personal ethics meter is always on code red. But Ms. Weymouth has learned a hard lesson, one that every publisher and owner should study and take note of. Innovations are great, rethinking old ways is smart, and even conferences — properly vetted — are fine.

But the newsroom remains a paper’s biggest asset. And you cannot afford to lose them, even when it means admitting that you, not some guy over in marketing, made a mistake.