On July 2 of last year, Politico broke a startling story: The Washington Post was planning to host off-the-record salons at which sponsors would pay to mingle with D.C. eminences and Post writers. The dinners--the first of which had been advertised in Post fliers as an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done”--were to take place at the home of Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher.
Weymouth, granddaughter of legendary Post owner Katharine Graham, had only been on the job for a year and a half. Now she was at the center of a potentially major journalistic scandal. Even though she was on vacation in Europe at the time, she was quick to react. “Absolutely, I’m disappointed,” she told Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. “This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren’t vetted.” A few days later, Weymouth penned a letter apologizing to readers. But that wasn’t enough to make the matter go away. The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, soon published an investigation concluding that Weymouth and other top Post employees had been intimately involved in planning the salons and knew about their off-the-record status. The episode, Alexander wrote, constituted “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.” (Click here to read what Andrew Sullivan calls the "best new blog.")
What Alexander didn’t say, and what Weymouth never quite admitted, was that the salons had, in fact, been her idea. Weymouth had wanted to get the Post into the conference business even before she was promoted to publisher, according to two senior executives close to her. “She had floated the [salon] idea several times,” says one of the executives. “There was no enthusiasm on the sales side to pursue it.” But Weymouth was determined to make the dinners happen, envisioning them as the first iteration of a series of ambitious conferences that would attract advertisers and readers.
Last spring, the Post recruited Charles Pelton, a fifty-two-year-old event planner whose firm had helped organize corporate-sponsored conferences for The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. Pelton was given an office in the Post executive suite. According to one source, Pelton was more interested in planning large conferences than salons, which didn’t need his level of expertise and were, moreover, financially irrelevant. (At most, the events would generate around half a million dollars, an amount that wouldn’t contribute any meaningful revenue to the Post’s bottom line.) But, given that it would be easier to plan the salons than the conferences, Pelton decided to start with the smaller events. He did, however, disagree with Weymouth about the venue: He believed her four-bedroom Chevy Chase house was too far outside the city center and not sophisticated enough for a high-level gathering. Instead, he suggested using a downtown restaurant, while another executive proposed the Georgetown residence of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee. But Weymouth rebuffed both ideas: She wanted the salons held at her home.
After the news of the salons surfaced in July, the events were canceled and the paper scuttled plans to host a larger conference modeled on Davos. Two months later, Pelton resigned. But, by then, the damage from salongate, as it came to be known, was done. Publicly, the Post had been humiliated; privately, the scandal had left the newsroom questioning the judgment of both Weymouth and Marcus Brauchli, the paper’s new editor. Brauchli had been on the job for only a year, and it was soon revealed that he, too, had been involved in planning the dinners. “I’ve been very upset by all this stuff,” one senior Post staffer told me recently. “It’s like, oh God, who are these people?” (Click here to read how Democrats can pass health care--even if Coakley loses.)
Why had Weymouth been so intent on holding the salons? One theory was that she was simply naïve. “This was inexperience on her part,” says former Post executive editor Len Downie. Another held that her ego was to blame. “I think Katharine wants to relive the glory days of her grandmother,” says one executive, alluding to Katharine Graham’s legendary dinner parties. (When I spoke to her recently, Weymouth declined to revisit the salon episode.) But, whatever the explanation, one thing seemed undeniable: The Washington Post was a desperate paper, and, in pushing the salons, Weymouth had essentially been casting about for anything, large or small, that might help to save it. Over the past year, the Post has folded its business section into the A-section, killed its book review, revamped its Sunday magazine, and redesigned the entire paper and website, while organizationally merging the print and online editions. Hundreds of staffers have left the Post since 2003, thanks to four rounds of buyouts. In 2008, the Post began losing money; in 2009, its advertising revenue dropped by $100 million. All of this while the paper was under siege from new competitors, national and local. “The common storyline is the Post is flailing,” a senior reporter says. “To me, it’s slightly different. It’s throwing everything up there to see what sticks.” “Everybody feels like we’re lurching,” says another reporter. “A company in chaos” is how a third Post staffer describes the state of the paper.
The Post, of course, is not alone; other large newspapers are suffering financially as well. And yet, the Post’s financial decline is only part of the story. Over the past few months, I have talked to about 50 current and former reporters, editors, Web staffers, and business employees. From these conversations, a picture has emerged of a paper suffering an identity crisis. Its peers seem to have coherent strategies for saving themselves: The New York Times is doubling down on journalism in the belief that it can persevere online as the global newspaper of record; The Wall Street Journal remains the country’s definitive chronicler of business; other large papers have tried to distinguish themselves by burrowing into local issues. But the Post seems to be paralyzed-and trapped. It can’t go completely local because the local news in Washington is, in many respects, national; and its status as the paper of record for national politics is under assault from numerous competitors--competitors it isn’t clear the Post can defeat. Meanwhile, the tense, even hostile, relationship between the print and online divisions hasn’t made the paper’s search for a coherent identity any easier. And so, in a new era for journalism, The Washington Post has yet to figure out what it wants to be. The result has been a lot of lurching--some of it (like salongate) embarrassing, much of it merely ineffective, but almost all of it suggesting a newspaper in disarray.
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