The Future of Journalism: a joint Media Alliance & Walkley Foundation initiative

5.1 The national newspaper: The Washington Post

On its website, The Washington Post declares its newsroom “still looks much like it did in the movie All the President’s Men, but it is far more diverse”. This isn’t strictly true – in the 1976 Watergate blockbuster, reporters were not shooting their own video, recording podcasts or preparing complex flash-based graphics packages, now the norm for washingtonpost.com. Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com executive editor, says his team were poor relations in the pecking order until recently. “The joke used to be, ‘giving us the heads up’ meant telling us 12 hours before a huge project was going to hit,” Brady said. “Now we are in the first meeting – and we are being asked what would you do on the web, what are the video opportunities here, how can we get readers involved, are there databases set up, are there ways of getting pieces of this series communicated to people on mobile phones.

We have become very good at working with the paper on big long-term projects and we are very good at working with the paper on huge short-term breaking news stories – it is the middle stuff we still struggle with. We don’t necessarily have the bodies to do that.” Brady said the Post had introduced comprehensive training and all reporters could shoot video, which – he said – was “the hot thing now”. It had been hampered by broadband speeds, but was growing in popularity. “We have a political blogger out there who has a camera mounted on his computer and when a big story breaks he will do the 60 seconds on what this means, and he will push a button on his computer, send it to our computer guys and 10 minutes later there will be a video of him up there reacting to Teddy Kennedy having a brain tumour … it is totally crappy video, it is a webcam, but it gets it out there.

Productions values are not everything – communicating simple information is what matters. You might get 10,000 video streams for something that took 90 seconds to make.” Brady has six dedicated video journalists (VJs) who make everything from documentary-style stories to three minute campaign reports. The site is separate from the print newsroom. About 100 dedicated online journalists prepare copy from the print operation, moderate blogs, produce video and podcasts and produce original stories. At last count, the Monday to Friday print version of The Post was selling 623,000 copies, down 1.9 per cent in the latest ABC audit.

Donald E Graham, chairman and CEO, has made the digital business his priority: “If internet advertising revenues don’t continue to grow fast,” he told Fortune in 2007, “I think the future of the newspaper business will be very challenging. The website simply has to come through.” The prognosis is challenging. Washington Post Co profits plummeted 86 per cent in the third quarter of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007. This was due to print losses which offset gains by the educational and cable TV divisions. The newspaper itself reported a quarterly operating loss of $82.7 million. Print advertising revenue was down 16 per cent for the first nine months of 2008, while quarterly digital revenues were up 13 per cent to $30.8 million.

The group’s cash cow is the Kaplan Education division, providing 53 per cent of revenue and reporting $603 million in third-quarter revenue, a 17 per cent gain over last year, and $51 million in operating income, a 36 per cent gain over the same period last year. Its other main internet venture is Slate.com, purchased in 2004, a free site supported by advertising (it sold subscriptions for less than a year). The group is hastily throwing its eggs into the online basket. Whether online revenue, growing far more slowly than traditional revenues are waning, will be enough is uncertain. For Warren Buffett, a director for more than 30 years, the future is online or not at all: “The present model - meaning print - isn’t going to work,” he told Fortune last year.25