The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Washington Post vs. Patch.com and Examiner.com

The Patch neigh­bor­hood news net­work—the screenshot’s from a New Jer­sey site—is com­ing soon to some Vir­ginia and Mary­land sub­urbs. Yet another sign that the Wash­ing­ton Post needs to get more seri­ous about hyper­local? And how about the growth of another hyper­local net­work, Examiner.com? Or the lat­est book on the Post, which, although a “valen­tine” on the whole, also por­trays some dis­turb­ing vulnerabilities?

Among the first Vir­ginia sub­urbs to be Patched in are Annan­dale, Burke, Reston and Wood­bridge. In Mary­land the ini­tial tar­gets are Col­lege Park, Hyattsville and Riverdale Park-Uni­ver­sity Park.

Should the Post be wor­ried, espe­cially with AOL as a Patch investor? Page views per Patch vis­i­tor have shot up in recent months, accord­ing to Alexa.com sta­tis­tics, and the com­pany is aim­ing for kudzu-fast growth. But the sites tend to be bland, and the network’s traf­fic is still a speck of that for Washingtonpost.com, even with all of Patch included from eight states. In the place of the Post, I’d worry more about the TBD.com local news startup and the Examiner.com network. 

TBD and its blog­ging net­work can lever­age its con­nec­tions with its cor­po­rate par­ent, Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the own­ers of NewsChan­nel 8, while Examiner.com is con­trolled by Philip Anschutz, the same bil­lion­aire behind the dead-tree Wash­ing­ton Exam­iner. He has yet to tap all the pos­si­ble syn­er­gies. Although most of the writ­ing on Examiner.com doesn’t awe me, the net­work is draw­ing some nice num­bers and uses a for­mula sim­i­lar to the one planned for TBD—a mix of geog­ra­phy and an appeal to read­ers’ pas­sion for sports or hob­bies. The chart is apples and oranges since it pits the entire net­work against the Washingtonpost.com and doesn’t fac­tor in the Post site’s advan­tages as a pres­ti­gious set­ting for ads, but keep in mind that most of the Post’s Web vis­i­tors are from out­side the D.C. area anyway.

In a related vein, I’ll soon be pub­lish­ing my ideas on how estab­lished news­pa­pers and broad­cast oper­a­tions can use the hyper­local approach to grow closer to their home­town read­ers, both directly and through their off­shoots. Mak­ing the topic all the time­lier is Morn­ing Mir­a­cle, Dave Kindred’s insid­ery new book on the Post. Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pany CEO Don­ald Gra­ham in the past has noted the impor­tance of local read­ers to the Post’s sus­tain­abil­ity. At one point, says Kin­dred, a for­mer Post sports colum­nist, Gra­ham observed that two thirds of the Post’s ad rev­enue came from the approx­i­mately 15 per­cent of its read­ers who were local. So what hap­pens if hyper­local net­works start drain­ing off some poten­tial rev­enue? Not the best news for L Street.

If the Post’s cov­er­age keeps diss­ing Alexan­dria, VA, and nearby areas, I myself will dras­ti­cally cut back the time I spend at Washingtonpost.com and prob­a­bly make up for it by way of the sites of local and hyper­local rivals. And for me to keep up with the world beyond Wash­ing­ton, there’s always the New York Times.

While the Post has closed domes­tic bureaus, the Times just keeps chug­ging along with national and inter­na­tional cov­er­age that is more thor­ough and bet­ter orga­nized than the Morn­ing Miracle’s. Maybe the Alexa.com com­par­i­son with the Times won’t be so dis­ap­point­ing after a Web-site makeover, per­haps aided by the NYT’s forth­com­ing pay wall, a sure­fire way to drive off read­ers. But for now, national and inter­na­tional are much iffier than local for the Post, given such strong com­pe­ti­tion. Beware of the Madonna Effect, the ten­dency of the stars to crowd out the rest. I’d like to see the Post regroup locally and use the rev­enue to be more com­pet­i­tive at all lev­els. Don­ald Gra­ham and oth­ers at the top have made it clear they’ll use only so much money from the prof­itable Kaplan divi­sion to prop up the Post.

The Post is still very, very repairable if the will exists; L Street just needs to get more seri­ous about local cov­er­age, among other things. That means good jour­nal­ism daily (as opposed to the flashy but oft-problematic con­test kind), not merely rev­enue growth. I want action­able infor­ma­tion on local and hyper­local issues such as taxes and zon­ing. I won’t buy the argu­ment that the Post is around just to cover Metro-area high­lights. Tech­nol­ogy and skill­ful crowd-sourcing can take care of that. Besides, Kin­dred notes that in 2009 the Post’s “shrunken newsroom…still had two hun­dred more peo­ple than in the Water­gate years.”

If the Post can’t improve locally, per­haps the Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pany may want to con­sider sell­ing off the first two words in its name. Keep in mind the invest­ment pref­er­ences of Post Com­pany board mem­ber War­ren Buf­fett for com­pa­nies with moats (PDF). Could the Post build a new-style moat in the D.C. area to deal with the TBDs and Patches? I believe so, just as I can also think of strate­gies that com­peti­tors could use against the Post. The Post shouldn’t wave good-bye to national and inter­na­tional cov­er­age. But hasn’t the com­pany already backed off some­what by shut­ting down the domes­tic bureaus? A mixed mes­sage? Why is cov­er­age of Alexan­dria so skimpy despite this sup­posed change in pri­or­i­ties, com­plete with a reminder from Exec­u­tive Edi­tor Mar­cus Brauchli that “we are not the national news orga­ni­za­tion of record serv­ing a gen­eral audience”?

For a some­what cheerier assess­ment of the Post than mine, check out Peter Osnos’s thoughts, at TheAtlantic.com, on both the news­pa­per and the Kin­dred book. An ex-Post reporter who became a book pub­lisher, he notes that the Post is recon­fig­ur­ing its Web site, has reduced the newspaper’s finan­cial losses and just pub­lished the Top Secret Amer­ica series. I hope he is right. But tell me, Peter, isn’t there some­thing wrong when on cer­tain days the front page of the Post metro sec­tion doesn’t men­tion the word “Vir­ginia,” or at least not in a news­stand edi­tion I picked up in my home­town of Alexan­dria? Don­ald Gra­ham, check out “DC MD VA M2” (Metro sec­tion iden­ti­fier) in the paper edi­tion for July 21. The only “VA” I see is in the iden­ti­fier. By con­trast, NewsChan­nel 8 always runs promi­nent home page links to Vir­ginia sto­ries, and I haven’t the slight doubt that Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be as con­sci­en­tious when the cable chan­nel rebrands itself as TBD and uses a new for­mat to boost its now-anemic num­bers. Will the Post be up to the chal­lenge if TBD catches on?

I even won­der about the Post’s Cof­fee­house News­room exper­i­ment, which has its place but which is no sub­sti­tute for sto­ries that arise more nat­u­rally; because the news­peo­ple should already be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the geo and demo­graph­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties covered.

But what to do, in more detail, to grow closer to read­ers? My forth­com­ing com­men­tary will offer some ideas for both news­pa­pers and broad­cast oper­a­tions. This growing-closer issue is no small mat­ter. I wrote The Solomon Scan­dals, my D.C. news­pa­per novel, to tell a story rather than preach. But along the way, Scan­dals is about dis­con­nects, not just within a fic­ti­tious news­pa­per but between it and the rest of the planet, espe­cially at the neigh­bor­hood level. Hyper­local jour­nal­ism, done well, could be at least a par­tial cure, and as a reader I want both the Post and rivals to suc­ceed with it. 

Related: Rim Rieder’s review of Morn­ing Mir­a­cle in the Post.