When the announcement came that the Washington Post and Dan Froomkin, writer of the White House Watch column would be parting ways, accusations began flying claiming that the Post was cementing its place as the home of the neocons. Even today, it continues:
Any media outlet in the nation would increase its credibility tenfold by including Froomkin in its DC bureau, just as the WaPo lost the bulk of its credibility by firing him.
I didn't say anything at the time, but I privately felt people were too quick to criticize. With W gone, could it possibly be that Froomkin had lost readership? Turns out, I was right, as the Washington City Paper reports today.
At the end of 2007, the Post published a list of its top ten most "popular opinions" of the year; Froomkin occupied three of the spots.
During that W. heyday, the column was pulling in a good 50,000 to 70,000 hits on a decent day. When it was really rocking, it would move to the 100,000 range, a phenomenal total.
The Obama administration has offered a less juicy target, in part because it hasn’t had quite as much time to screw things up. In the past six months, accordingly, hits on White House Watch have dropped to the point that Post officials cite traffic as a reason for bagging the column.
"His traffic had gone way down," says Fred Hiatt, the paper’s editorial page editor. Froomkin himself uses the same talking point: "Traffic definitely did go down."
And right there, the discussion hits something of a brick wall: Though washingtonpost.com’s overall Web-hit numbers are public information, the paper places breakout stats for columns and blogs in a secret cache, which complicates any effort to piece together Froomkin’s traffic trends.
A few snapshots from recent months, however, appear to corroborate the smaller Obama-era audience. Over three days in late March and early April, for example, White House Watch bounced from No. 3 to No. 7 to No. 11 on the list of top washingtonpost.com blogs. The hits for the column were 49,000, 29,000, and 15,000 on those days.
And over a three-day period in late May, Froomkin’s rankings came in at No. 6, No. 6, and No. 7. Hits for each of those days were right around 20,000. A Post source says that White House Watch’s traffic has suffered a two-thirds drop over time.
The traffic slump is apparently dire enough that Post brass could no longer justify paying Froomkin about $100,000 in contract money to crank out daily commentary—a sum that falls short of what the Post pays many national political reporters. "We have had to make a lot of hard decisions about resources," says Hiatt.
Like most newspapers, the Post is losing money every day. Is it any surprise they start looking for ways to cut costs? Froomkin's dropping readership made him an easy target.
And it's not as if they just let him go without trying to work something out.
Once Post editors decided that White House Watch was no longer viable, they gave Froomkin a chance to come forward with "ideas for potential features that would take him in a new and different direction and that might resonate more with readers. Unfortunately, he wasn’t interested in doing anything else for The Post," says [Marisa] Katz, [the paper’s Web opinions editor].
The City Paper also explains how Froomkin stepped on the beats of some other opinion writers, which goes to why he made an easy target.