Written by Charles Kaiser
The Washington Post died today. It was five months short of its 132nd birthday.
The tears of emotion won't rival Michael Jackson's obituary, but maybe it should to all those who care about journalism.
Kaiser continues to state the reasons of its, well, departure from the journalism world
News of the demise of the once-great news gathering organization came in a story by Mike Allen at Politico.com, which reported that Post publisher Katharine Weymouth has decided to solicit payoffs of between $25,000 and $250,000 from Washington lobbyists, in return for one or more private dinners in her home, where lucky diners will receive a chance for “your organization’s CEO” to interact with “Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post” and “key Obama administration and congressional leaders …”
Was Hackio's notorious hack Allen its killer? No, it caused it all on itself.
As news of the Politico story raced across the Internet this morning, former and present news executives inside and outside The Washington Post Company reacted with stunned horror. As Allen put it in his Politico story, “The offer which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.”
Addiction to the drug of stupidity played a major part.
Next came the firing of Dan Froomkin, the best and most original reporter on the Post’s website--presumably because Froomkin wrote so many accurate stories pointing up the inadequacies of the national staff of the Post.
And it's death may lead to more obituaries written, if they already haven't been penned already.
Graham’s granddaughter, Katharine Weymouth, was widely admired within The Washington Post Company as she climbed up the corporate ladder before finally succeeding her uncle Donald Graham as the paper’s publisher. But the extraordinary economic pressures faced by every American newspaper as their traditional business model has collapsed has now led to a comparable collapse in corporate judgment. When historians look back at this event, they will note it as the beginning of the end of newspapers as we have known them.
It's a funeral that all of us can attend at any time. It's a funeral that somehow, leads to a birth.
(With additional coverage of the funeral, reporting TWD )