Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth was at Poynter on May 20 to open the “Edge of Change” colloquium, which honors women in journalism’s past, present and future. Weymouth sat down for an hour-long interview with Poynter President Karen Dunlap, who asked her about the salons, which for the first time she said were her idea; the integration of the paper’s print and digital operations; the business of journalism; her namesake grandmother Katharine Graham; and more. The interview — conducted in front of the nearly 70 attendees of the “Edge of Change” program — will be broadcast on CSPAN at a time to be determined. A portion of the edited transcript of their conversation is below; an entire transcript is available, along with a selection of highlights and a story about the evening.
Karen Dunlap: Let’s start by talking about leadership. Is there one piece of advice or one tip that particular stands out on leadership?
Katharine Weymouth: I think I hardly consider myself an expert but the thing that I think about the most is something that Don Graham, my uncle and the CEO and Chairman of the company, said to me years ago. He said, ‘Katharine, you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to surround yourself with the smartest people in the room and listen.’ And that is what I try to do.
Surround yourself with the smartest people and listen. … If your grandmother were here today, and you wanted to describe to her the state of women in the media today, what would you tell her?
Weymouth: I think I would say the world has changed a lot. It’s not perfect, we obviously have a ways to go. But there are tons of women in journalism now. We obviously have to do better in the top ranks. We have a woman as a managing editor, and we have lots of women editors. The Columbia Journalism School, its graduating class, I was told recently, was 63 percent women. So I feel like it is pretty normal for women to be in business and in journalism.
Some of the challenges that I see for women are often how do you have kids and juggle it and do your career and how far up the chain do you want to go and what sacrifices are you willing to make and then of course what opportunities are you offered?
But I think we’ve come a long way.
I didn’t think that was foremost on her [Katharine Graham’s] mind, the state of women. Does it come to your mind very often?
Weymouth: I think in her case she went right straight from being a mother at home having raised four kids to being CEO, so she didn’t know what it was like to go up the ranks, but she knew what it was like to be the only woman on the board of the AP. And there’s that picture of her that she has in her book that I love, where she is literally the only woman in a room of, I don’t know, 50 men. It’s an amazing photo.
Let’s talk about news media. Again, let’s assume she’s here. How would you describe to her the state of news media today?
Weymouth: We’re obviously in a huge stage of transition, I don’t think I need to tell anyone in this room, but I think it’s also incredibly exciting, and I think she would see that. I flew down here today with my two little kids and they watched ‘SpongeBob’ on the iPad. And a couple of months ago I was driving my then-9-year-old to school and she was playing on the iPhone and I thought, she just has to know. I said, ‘Madeleine, you know, when I was growing up, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have DVD players,’ whatever. She looked at me completely seriously and she was like, ‘Wow, mommy, it must have been hard growing up in the olden days.’
It’s unfathomable. My 4-year-old didn’t know how to read but she knew how to get to YouTube and get Dora videos.
It’s scary from the business perspective. How do you sustain quality journalism? But the demand for news and the ability to get news is greater than ever. We have — people write about and talk a lot about the decline of circulation in newspapers and ‘oh my God, what’s happening?’
We have a bigger audience than we have ever had. Ninety percent of our page views for WashingtonPost.com come from outside the Washington area, and roughly 10-15 percent of those are international.
And we don’t distribute outside of the Washington region, so for us it’s enabled us to get an audience that’s all over the world for the incredible journalism that we put out.
So, our challenge is to figure out, how do you pay for it?
OK, so what’s the answer?
Weymouth: I was gonna ask you. I don’t have the answer, I’m not a believer that there’s a magic bullet, but if I find it or if any of you have it I’d love to take it.
But I think when you look at the history of journalism, it really is, and people have written a lot about this, it’s an anomaly.
The profitability that newspapers sustained in this last century was an anomaly. Newspapers were not profitable for most of their lives. And as Warren Buffett would say, when it was profitable, it was a toll booth.
It was a brilliant model. If you were an advertiser and you wanted to reach the local audience, you had to advertise in the newspaper. So our classified section — for those of us local newspapers — were terrific and brought us in hundreds of millions of dollars. If you were going to buy a car, if you were going to get a job, you went to The Washington Post. Of course, you still do today, it just may be online.
So, the whole world has changed. People are on Craigslist and eBay and Monster and AutoTrader, and you name it.
There are a thousand different companies coming after almost every niche we’re in.
So I think when we had money to invest, we invested it back in the newsroom, which is where we should invest it. But at this point, we just, we have to cut back. We have to have a smaller cost structure, which is not fun, and it’s not glamorous, but in order to sustain the kind of quality journalism we all believe in, we have to do that so we can continue to do it and continue to invest in our journalism. And at the same time, experiment on new platforms.
We are gonna be on the iPad, we are on the iPhone. You can have podcasts, you can get us on the Internet, so we will be where our readers want to be.
