Legend has it that the editors at Washington Post and the NY Times communicate each day to confirm that they have different lead stories/images on their front page. Well, it appears that the communication lines between Marcus Brauchli and Bill Keller were not open last night, as both venerable newspapers lead with the same image from the tragic Cambodia stampede from yesterday. (H/T Patrick Gavin)

Underscoring the blurred lines when reporters and bloggers also offer opinions–both for the paper and in media appearances–WaPo’s Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli acknowledged to Alexander “that readers may be confused by Post journalists who ‘wear more than one hat’ when they ‘opine in one forum and appear to report in another forum,’” and suggested there should be more transparency about what people do and where people stand.

Alexander cited the examples of Weigel, Ezra Klein and Cathy Areu in raising concerns about how readers are supposed to know when objective reporters also offer opinions.  In the case of Areu, a freelancer blessed with a “contributing editor” title while she spends time as a pundit for CNN and other cable news programs, Alexander said the paper had “confused readers and provided ammunition to critics who say it’s agenda-driven. The remedy seems simple. Areu’s “contributing editor” label amounts to fiction and should be ended before it provokes more allegations of institutional bias.”

While reporters were once hired to be impartial, Alexander explained that staffers like Klein are hired to offer opinions and therefore it was necessary to explain to readers–both in print and online–that he isn’t offering news, even when he appears in the business section instead of the opinion section.

It appears that WaPo staffers are as confused about the rules as readers when it comes to news versus offering opinions. Alexander said that he spoke with a dozen WaPo reporters about the Post’s guidelines that say reporters should not “offer personal opinions on a blog in a way that would not be acceptable in the newspaper” and that none of them seemed familiar with the rules which live on the paper’s intranet.

Although Alexander acknowledged that the Post, like most legacy media, gives mixed-messages when it comes to impartiality and “expand[ing] The Post’s brand on new media platforms that don’t strictly adhere to the time-honored just-the-facts approach,” he quoted Brauchli as saying “traditional reporting positions” should remain unbiased.

But who has  “traditional reporting positions” at the paper?  Are all bloggers considered non-traditional?  While Weigel had a lot of opinions in private and went on MSNBC to offer his views on conservatives, it’s not clear that his actual work at the Post wasn’t traditional reporting because he was generally praised for his objective coverage of the conservative movement.

Speculation that Quinn’s much-maligned column was likely to end has been the buzz of the Washington Post newsroom all week but WaPo executive editor Marcus Brauchli finally confirmed to Eric Wemple that Quinn’s column was going back on-line to the safe confines of WaPo’s “On Faith,” which is edited by Quinn and Newsweek‘s Jon Meacham.

“Sally and I have agreed that the column will return to what had been its original focus on faith, family and entertaining and will appear online at “On Faith,” a section of washingtonpost.com that Sally guides,” Brauchli told Wemple.

Quinn–who is married to former WaPo executive editor Ben Bradlee–set off the firestorm after using her entertaining column on the front of the Friday Style Section to clarify that there was no drama behind the rumors that she had rescheduled her son’s wedding on the same day as Bradlee’s granddaughter’s wedding to further a family grudge.

The dueling wedding rumors were started by former WaPo gossip columnist Annie Groer who wrote for Politics Daily that Sally had moved up son Quinn Bradlee’s wedding after the bride announced she was pregnant.  The only available day turned out to be the same day Greta Bradlee is supposed to get married in California.  Although Sally and Ben had already said they weren’t attending Greta’s wedding because of tension between Ben and his son, Ben Bradlee Jr. who is divorced from Greta’s mom, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, Sally acknowledged the whole thing looked bad.  She blamed the snafu on her husband for not putting Greta’s wedding date on his calendar.

The column turned into another black-eye for the Style section, long considered one of the WaPo’s premier sections. In November, a legendary editor and young-turk writer came to blows over the lack of quality in the Style section.  Brauchli had to break up that fight, but many suggested it exemplified problems in leadership and editing in the features section.

One of Quinn’s colleagues in the Style section, Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten, blamed Sally’s editor for not killing the column and saving Quinn from harming herself and the paper. Politico‘s Michael Calderone reported that both Raddatz and Bradlee Jr. contacted Post publisher Katharine Weymouth to complain about their family issues being dragged into the Style section.

In addition to Quinn losing her column, Groer is speculating that Quinn is going to change her son’s wedding–again–in order to ease family drama.  And where does she plan to announce his mea culpa?  Groer says it may in her final regular column scheduled for Friday.

We can only hope.

The summertime controversy — “off-the-record salons at which sponsors would pay to mingle with D.C. eminences and Post writers” — is revealed as the brainchild of publisher Weymouth, and as a result of her inexperience and thirst to return the paper to its glory days of exclusivity under her grandmother.

“It’s like, oh God, who are these people?” an anonymous senior Post staffer is quoted as saying. The piece is largely constructed around anonymous, occasionally vague complaints like these. On the record quotes from past or current staff tend to be favorably, if a little defensive, as is wont to happen in a company exposé of this scale. Sourced by “50 current and former reporters, editors, Web staffers, and business employees” the Sherman piece outlines the paper’s “indentity crisis,” calling it both ” paralyzed and trapped” even when compared to other struggling newspaper behemoths like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, the tense, even hostile, relationship between the print and online divisions hasn’t made the paper’s search for a coherent identity any easier. And so, in a new era for journalism, The Washington Post has yet to figure out what it wants to be. The result has been a lot of lurching–some of it (like salongate) embarrassing, much of it merely ineffective, but almost all of it suggesting a newspaper in disarray.

In addition to a weighty history lesson, Sherman provides a who’s who of Post staffers — seminal, controversial and indispensable — and the decisions they’ve guided, including a steadfast focus on print vs. the web. Sherman writes:

The conclusion was that print was just too valuable to deemphasize. To illustrate the point, according to one participant in the meeting, Hills put up a chart showing that a daily print subscriber represents $500 in revenue for the paper, while a website reader brings in only $6. “In Steve’s presentation, he was completely focused on the print paper,” the participant recalls. “If you sat in these meetings, the biggest problem was the person who runs the business side doesn’t care about the Web. You bring up mobile and he gets uncomfortable.”

And there’s no need to drive home the point being made with the above decision: ignore the internet and you’ll flounder, eventually, if not now. “Philosophical divides” or not, harmony must be achieved, but it remains elusive at the paper. “At the Post, the Neanderthals won,” said a former online staffer.

You can read more about the Post‘s internal divisions, hiring practices and legendary figures like Bob Woodward in the rest of Sherman’s cover story, available here in full.

Post Apocalypse [The New Republic]

(photo)

“The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There’s been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things — killed for unworthy reasons — have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.”

– WaPo’s Gene Weingarten weighs in, sort of, on yesterday’s fisticuffs in the Post newsroom. The whole essay is more than worth your time, additionally so for the Henry Allen excerpts. Who knew an entire industry could yearn for the day when ‘”what we put in the paper” was worth exchanging blows over.

Washingtonian is reporting that Allen, a newspaper stalwart in his late 60s, punched Roig-Franzia after a disagreement over a collaborative story Roig-Franzia had been working on with fellow Style-section writer Monica Hesse. Their editor thought it was garbage, unworthy of the Style section:

Allen took a look and didn’t like. He started ranting about the number of mistakes he had found.

Hesse at one point asked him to send the copy back to her. She got a bit teary at the verbal beatdown.

Allen, according to sources, said: “This is total crap. It’s the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years.”

Roig-Franzia then wandered into the newsroom. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has been turning out political features for Style. He heard Allen’s rant and stopped by his desk.

“Oh, Henry,” he supposedly said, “don’t be such a cocks—–.”

That set off the former Marine editor:

Allen lunged at Roig-Franzia, threw him to the newsroom floor, and started throwing punches. Roig-Franzia tried to fend him off.

Allegedly, the old-timey Allen was not thrilled with the “charticle” Roig-Franzia and Hesse had been working on, favoring the days when the paper allowed a writer to take “a hundred inches on the wonder of plastic lawn furniture or the true meaning of the Vietnam War Memorial.”

It seems like we’re seeing this story play out over and over again: newspapers are changing. And apparently, in order to save it, some will go down swinging.

Check out a full recounting of the story here.

That question and others have come to light after a letter from Brauchli to now-resigned Post marketing director Charles Pelton, saying that he did know after all that the proposed dinners (ultimately aimed at making money) would be off the record, was sent to the Times by Pelton’s lawyer.

Today the New York Times ran a correction pertaining to two of its articles from the summer about the Post‘s Salon-gate:

An article on July 3 reported on aborted plans for the publisher of The Washington Post to hold corporate-sponsored dinner parties including Post journalists.

One issue in the controversy was that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record.” The article quoted The Post’s executive editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, as saying that the newsroom would “reserve the right to allow any ideas that emerge in an event to shape or inform our coverage.” By The Post’s definition of the term, that means the events would not be “off the record.”

On Sept. 12, an article in The Times reported that Charles Pelton, the marketing executive at the center of the plans, had resigned from The Post. That article, referring again to Mr. Brauchli’s comments at the time, reported that he said he had not understood that the dinners would be off the record.

However, in a subsequent letter to Mr. Pelton — which was sent to The Times by Mr. Pelton’s lawyer — Mr. Brauchli now says that he did indeed know that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record,” and that he and Mr. Pelton had discussed that issue.

Times spokesperson Diane McNulty told NYT Picker, a blog dedicated to tracking the New York Times which claims to be run anonymously by journalists, that “The note speaks for itself.” That said, the Times also buried the note as a correction.

So reads David Carr‘s description of the Washington Post’s “relatively new publisher” Katharine Weymouth in Saturday’s print edition of The New York Times. It happens to be a description that could fit a whole lot of people in this new media world, though at the moment none are getting the blowback that Weymouth is over Salon-gate.

Short version: On Thursday Politico reported that it had come into possession of a flier advertising special WaPo ‘salons’:

“For “$25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off the record, non-confrontational access to ‘those powerful few’ — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.”

Cue media outrage.

Shortly after the news broker the executive editor Marcus Brauchli denounced the offer saying “We will not participate in events where promises are made that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our independence from advertisers or sponsors is inviolable.”

Weymouth, herself, responded saying the flier had not been properly vetted. By the end of the day the salon’s had been canceled altogether.

Oh but it doesn’t end there. On Friday the NYT got on its A-1 high horse and gave the story front page placement. Followed by Carr’s Media Equation column, pushed up two days in order to capitalize on the debacle. More from Carr:

Ms. Weymouth is confronted with the same crisis as every publisher in the country. The Web has robbed newspapers of paying readers and advertisers, the economic downturn is cutting into what is left, and smaller, nimbler Internet competitors are learning to slake the 24-hour news thirst on their own.

Carr goes on to point out that all this “salon” chatter comes at a high cost to the newsroom, who are not happy with the current state of affairs. However, the most criticism seems to be directed more at Weymouth’s handling of the situation pr-wise, than the idea behind the salons themselves. Are they so terrible? Gawker says that WaPo was just bringing to light a practice that is common in the media world. And they may be righter than they know! Politico has followed up their story(ies) with a report that both the Wall St. Journal and The Economist hold similar events:

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper’s top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, The Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

Lesson? Perhaps the real (world) problem WaPo faces is less an ethical one than merely a case of “clumsy” PR. The new media reality is a tricky one.