Washington Post staff morale drops over new makeover
The Tatler has learned that morale is continuing to fall at the Washington Post as it conducts yet another design makeover in an effort to stop dramatic readership losses. The new re-design is to be launched this coming Sunday. Post readership continues to plummet as daily circulation fell 10.7% during the first six months of last year. Its flagship Sunday edition fell 9.5%. Readers are abandoning the Post in droves in the nation’s capital.
The Post’s latest makeover continues its trend towards soft pop culture coverage. In a move seen as silly by Post staffers, the paper is separating the Style section from the Arts section. “Brilliant move” one Post staffer sarcastically told the Tatler. To old timers this seems like moving around chairs on the Titanic. Years ago the paper had separate sections and at the time they were combined as a new selling point to readers.
There also will be a new tabloid size section focusing on popular culture, a new “Deal Hunter” section for coupons and sales, a “Web Insight” section on blogs, and weekly photo galleries of D.C. social scene.
Post staff tell the Tatler they’ve seen it all before and predict it will make no difference in improving the declining reporting quality of the paper. “It’s all about marketing,” one long-time staffer confessed to the Tatler. The makeover certainly has nothing to do about news gathering or reporting. Last year the paper downsized its Business section, subsuming it into the main news section.
In the second quarter of 2010, the Post reported a $14.3 million loss.
If it wasn’t for its for-profit educational company called Kaplan, Post losses would be more severe. In 2010 the U.S. General Accounting Office criticized Kaplan along with 14 other for-profit educational companies for deceptive practices.
Last November the Washington Post sold Newsweek magazine for $1, merging it with the Daily Beast.
WaPo will continue to shamble around in its death throes indefinitely until so-called Conservative blogs like Hot Air and Instapundit stop linking every other story to their website, which is probably the only thing bringing that Leftist rag money right now.
No matter how you package it the lies, distortion, lack of true journalistuc ethics, and liberal agenda will always stink worse than any fish it might be used to wrap.
Nicely said -
I believe Warren Buffet resigned from the board this week. Melinda Gates resigned last November. Time to sell.
It’s about content, not marketing. We get it because my husband loves the sports page. If they mess with that I am free of it.
Maybe they’ll put their relationship and religion expert, Sally Quinn, in charge of the whole thing and we can sit a decent shiva for it.
I was briefly an MCAT instructor at Kaplan. They give enrollees a subscription to a paper for signing up to help them with the Verbal Reasoning section of the test. Guess which paper they give them … No, its not the Washington Post (even though that would make some sense, since its their own paper!) Give up?!
They give each student a subscription to the Wall Street Journal! (which, after all, is the best paper in America today) Kaplan doesnt want to spoil their brand by giving a cut rate paper!
While I agree entirely that the Post is in long-term if not terminal decline, why is the irrelevant comment about the GAO and allegedly deceptive practices of for-profit education enterprises thrown in, when Instapundit if not other PJM bloggers have been criticizing those critics for some time?
Read the post again. The Washington Post Co. is bleeding money. Kaplan is the only part of the company that is making a profit. Now the Feds are going after for-profit education companies. That will hurt the Washington Post Co.’s bottom line, regardless of the merit of the Feds’ crusade.
$1 for Newsweek?
The Daily Beast overpaid.
Yes, they overpaid, especially since that $1 bought a lot of debt.
Newsweek, along with virtually every other weekly, is a vanity publication now. You own it to get your POV out there, not to make money.
9 out of 10 dogs in D.C. prefer the WaPo editorial pages.
Its the bias, stupid.
Today’s “journolist” is no different than the hacks that ran Pravda. I hope they starve.
Most print newspapers are in decline. Most of them can’t seem to figure out that cutting coverage is exactly the wrong move.
Cutting useless management and expanding coverage, while focusing on the Web, and straight to device products like the iPad and Andriod tablets might save newspapers. The problem is management can’t see that.
Patrick
Somewhere, Richard Nixon is smiling.
WaPo sold NewsWEAK for $1
Bwaahahahaha
An old joke goes like this:
Someone open a brothel, and it is not a huge success. He changes beds, changes walls color, changes name, nothing works. He asks an advice from an old expert. Expert comes, looks, and says
-Change the girls.
I think they need this expert.
One of the best and funniest things ever written by Iowahawk:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2007/05/subscribe_now_1.html
on the theme of the decline of newspaper journalism.
It is better than the NY Times, which is barely readable. That’s not saying much, I know.
How did these folks ever get to be part of the “intellectual elite”? I barely made it out of sixth grade and can tell that they “biassed” (spell it whichever way you want..one “s” or two)themselves out of business. They can change anything else they want but “it don’t make no nevermind” as far as stopping the fall.
Hey, here’s an idea. Hire a bunch of skeptics who hate all politicians equally and don’t trust anybody’s words but fact check them, do research and present what they’ve found out. It would make for longer articles going into far greater depth than available on the ‘sound bite’ driven tv/cable news. Might be a market for that kind of thing, maybe even start to generate a following…
I will never again read or even consider the Washington Post as a serious newspaper. I have found however, that my canaries love it!