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]

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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.