American Magazine | Spring 2006
http://www.american.edu/american/fall06_webpaperipod.html
Web, Paper, iPod
Over the past several years, journalists have spilled a lot of ink—and written even more digital text—worrying about their future. Newspapers, we’re told, are dying; the Web is collapsing the reporting cycle into a matter of seconds; and blogs are shifting authority from media conglomerates to self-styled pundits typing away from their bedrooms. Surely, tomorrow’s news will look like nothing we’ve seen before.
Not so, says Washington Post Company vice president and AU alumnus Patrick Butler ’96. From where he sits, the future of the media actually looks a lot like the past. “It’s going back in a way to the days of the lonely pamphleteer in colonial America,” he explains, characterizing Ben Franklin, the country’s first self-styled pundit, as a proto-blogger of sorts. “Then, everybody had more of a chance to publish their own views for a relatively low cost, and now we’ve come full circle.”
For those of us thumbing or clicking through tomorrow’s news then, the best way to sort out the truth may be to read like Americans did more than 200 years ago. “In colonial days nobody expected anybody in the journalism business to be fair and objective,” says Butler, noting that though he expects traditional media like the Post to remain impartial, readers will again have to filter more of the truth for themselves. “They expected that each one of these pamphleteers and newspapers was going to be promoting a certain point of view . . . and people took all of that with a grain of salt. They had to read enough, be exposed to enough, and be interested enough to have a comprehensive and sophisticated view of what all these people were trying to say. No one had a monopoly on the truth, but in the cacophony of different opinions and different bits of information, a compelling version of the truth could emerge.”
With a guiding hand in business development decisions throughout the decade that saw the Post Company shift its focus from print to new media, Butler has already seen much of the future he’s describing. Post Company president Donald Graham characterizes him as one of the “unsung heroes” in helping the company “understand and take advantage of the opportunity these new media offered.”
In his 12 years with the company, Butler extended its television presence by founding Newsweek Productions and supervising more than 200 hours of Emmy award–winning documentaries. He helped craft digital communication as the chair of PCS Action. He worked with a handful of other executives to launch and guide what some see as the clearest picture of the future of news,washingtonpost.com. In fact, with its 9 million online readers, daily live Web-hosted discussions, and hundreds of links to internal and external blogs, the Post Web site may offer the clearest glimpse into how traditional news organizations will adapt to a world in which news is increasingly shaped by virtual pamphleteers.
The award-winning washingtonpost.com began as what the site’s executive editor, AU alumnus Jim Brady ’89 calls an insurance policy. “They knew there was certainly a chance that [the Web] was going to be a big deal and inevitably create some tension for the newspaper industry,” says Brady. “The thinking was, if we’re going to lose readers, let’s lose them to ourselves before someone else beats us to the punch.”
Though they didn’t know what the future held for the Web, Post Company brass made one thing clear from the start: washingtonpost.com, which will turn 10 in June, would grow on its own as a legitimate news source free to compete with the newspaper that spawned it. “We thought, well this is our version of inventing television or inventing radio—it was that fundamental,” says Butler. “We didn’t feel like we’d be cannibalizing ourselves; we just felt like we needed to provide the same kind of information and high quality journalism in the evolving forms that people want.”
The attitude that allowed the Web site to evolve so it now nets a larger profit than the newspaper itself puts a twist on that mantra from Field of Dreams. Rather than “If you build it, they will come,” the thinking went “If they come, you will build it.” Unlike many newspaper Web sites, washingtonpost.com doesn’t charge for any of its content, including all of the daily news carried over from the print edition. “We’ve kind of put our eggs in the basket of let’s offer everything for free and try to build an audience,” explains Brady. “And if you build the audience—if you get enough people to come to the site—you know you’ll find a way to monetize that.”
This attitude has built not only enough advertising revenue to turn a healthy profit, but also an expanded global presence for what had long been a regional newspaper. Though the Post never focused on print distribution or advertising outside of the Washington region, says Butler, 60 percent of its online audience hails from the rest of the nation, and 20 percent from overseas.
Since gaining worldwide fame for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate coverage in the early 1970s, the Post has been regarded as a dominant voice in Washington. Then there’s its signature-style of reporting that, according to SOC professor Wendell Cochran, shapes “conversation throughout the city . . . and that’s really the role the Post has played.”
But today’s readers crave a bigger role in shaping that conversation. No doubt tomorrow’s will want even more. The Post’s treatment of bloggers as partners rather than competitors marks a significant shift that may be a sign of what’s to come for other traditional news organizations that keep self-made pundits at arm’s length. “There’s no question that everybody’s got a printing press now, and people want to be involved in the conversation,” says Brady. “A lot of that conversation surrounds stuff that comes out of the Post or the New York Times or other news organizations, so it would be silly for us to ignore that those conversations are happening. Our attitude is we should host them if we can.”
To do that, washingtonpost.com was the first and is still one of the only traditional news sites in which every article prominently features links to bloggers’ commentaries on the story—whether positive or negative. Similarly, the site hosts dozens of online discussions on issues raised by its news coverage, and each of its stories features e-mail links to put readers directly in touch with Washington Post staff writers.
Of course, there have been growing pains. In January, for instance, Brady temporarily suspended comments on post.blog, a Post-hosted blog discussing the washingtonpost.com site itself, after it was flooded with personal attacks and profane rants against ombudsman Deborah Howell, who wrote that the embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff had made contributions to Democrats as well as Republicans. “A lot of people have said this is an example of what’s going to happen every time anybody criticizes the Post: they’re going to shut down a message board,” says Brady. “But it wasn’t about criticizing the Post. You can go to the site today and find hundreds of comments criticizing the newspaper . . . The idea is that we’re trying to build a civil community here.”
Despite such problems, both Butler and Brady see a future in which news publishing and community building go hand in hand. Brady expects the news to one day spur elationships that outlive the day’s headlines. “As opposed to everyone being voyeurs and coming in and reading an article here and there,” he says, “let’s take those people who are all coming to read this same article and figure out how to have them interact with each other based on this common interest.”
Yet even as mainstream media become more willing to share and host the conversation, rather than just shape it themselves, standards like old-fashioned journalistic objectivity seem likely to thrive in spite, or even because, of the surrounding chatter. Though some worry that the bloggers’ penchants for spin, partisanship, and plain old ranting will push news toward opinion, Butler and Brady have a different take.
“What we are finding . . . is that, as there are more and more sources of information available, it is the traditional sources of news and information [that] are all of a sudden the most highly prized, precisely because people feel that they can trust them—that we’re at least going to try to get things right,” says Butler, who expects the increasing prominence of amateur, opinion-based reporting to have a “strengthening effect” on the standards that separate news from commentary. “Whether we live up to it or not, we try, and people know that we try. And that’s going to continue to be important.”
So then what about these dying newspapers? For Butler and Brady, at least, it looks like it’s far too early to start planning the funeral. Though both forecast a continued decline in the circulation and expect that Web sites will have to find a way to shoulder more of the reporting costs, they agree that readers preferring newsprint-stained fingers to monitor-weary eyes are likely to keep the traditional format around for some time. The Post Company, in fact, is betting on it. “Eight years ago,” says Butler. “We spent 250 million to build a whole new set of printing presses on the expectation that there was at least another generation of people who would want the newspaper in the traditional way.”
And if history is any indication, the “traditional way” seems likely to stick around even beyond that generation. “Nothing in the media business ever gets completely replaced,” says Butler. “The history of the business instead has been that newspapers and magazines are not replaced by radio, but radio builds on them; television builds on radio; the Internet builds on newspaper, television, and radio; and now you have iPods, and who knows what else will build on what else?”
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