Arlene Morgan: There’ve been a lot of studies recently about government subsidies to keep the press going, including one that was authored at Columbia by your former editor [Len Downie]. What do you think of that idea? Do you think that’s a viable idea?
Katharine Weymouth: No. I think it’s comforting to people. But I think we have to be a profitable business and an independent one in order to do what we do.
So you don’t think this is going to go anywhere?
Weymouth: No. But a lot of my journalists will always say like, ‘Why can’t we be a nonprofit?’ I’m like, ‘We are. We just don’t get the tax write-off.’
Wanda Lloyd: A long time ago, organizations like AOL and Google and Yahoo figured out how to aggregate information. And a lot of young people, including young people my daughter’s age in her mid-20s, think that’s news and that’s where the news comes from. Do you think we have to — how do we overcome that? How do we compete with that kind of aggregation? Do we have to get in bed with them? Or do we find smarter ways to do it?
Weymouth: I’m not opposed to aggregation. I think smart aggregation is a service to readers. And we do it, too. And I think it is a service. Whether it’s a politics page and you want Dan Balz to tell you what is he reading, what does he think are the smartest articles today on the elections or the primaries. So, I think aggregation is great and, interestingly, organizations like Yahoo and AOL are now building up their own original content. They’re hiring journalists and they’re doing original content online, which is very intriguing to me.
So I’m all for aggregation. And the more eyeballs we can get to our content, the better. We do want readers to be educated and to understand the difference between, what is a source that you can trust as opposed to just rumors out there. And the difference between just repurposing content and not crediting it.
I think blogs are the same thing. There are some great blogs out there from experts in the field that we rely on sometimes as sources. And our journalists do their own blogs. And then there are a lot of blogs by people who just woke up and want to tell you what they feel like this morning.
That’s sort of, to me, market sourcing. The market will figure out which ones are, for the most part, are interesting and worth reading. There’s a lot of dreck out there, too.
Audience Question: You hear in journalism school now a lot that journalists need to be one-man bands and learn how to do everything from writing stories to shoot and editing video. At what point is — I guess I’m reminded of the phrase, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none.’ At what point are you spreading yourself too thin versus being well-rounded?
Weymouth: That’s a great question. At the Post we still do believe in expertise. We have entire photo teams of professional photographers, professional videographers and writers. So I don’t think it’s bad to have the skills. What if you’re in Afghanistan and you don’t have a photographer with you? It’d be great if you could get the photos. But, to your point, I think we very much believe in expertise. There is a difference between a photograph taken by a professional, trained photographer with a great camera or a beautiful story.
And I hear some of our journalists talk about — I think the harder part is how do you do this in a 24/7 world? It’s no longer just writing your story for tomorrow’s paper. It’s writing your story and putting it up online and then maybe doing a video chat on it. And many of them are challenged just with time. It’s now really a 24/7 cycle. And that’s hard.
Audience Question: On the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) listserv recently, a young journalist, working at a paper, looking for advice, who was working very hard, and was having things like, they wouldn’t take her pitches or they would take her pitches and give it to someone else. And she was frustrated. And one of the things our members said is, ‘You need to find a mentor.’ Or, ‘You need to leave and find another place to work.’
There’s a lot of data — it’s not just about working hard — I think a lot of women and young women do work hard. It’s more than that. It’s not a meritocracy. There’s a lot of data that men are just better about advocating for themselves, about saying to their bosses, stopping by, ‘This is what I’m doing today.’ And women just don’t do that as much.
So I was wondering if the Post has a mentoring program, for young journalists particularly women or minority journalists.
Weymouth: I think that’s a totally fair point. I think that we all know at least — as a generality, it’s true. And even as a lawyer, it’s true. Often, the women would come back and somebody would say, ‘Congratulations, I hear you won your argument.’ And they’d be like, ‘It was easy,’ or ‘The judge liked me,’ or whatever. And the men would come back and be like, ‘Wow, you should have seen me.’ That is true in many professions.
We do not have a formal mentoring program. I’m not a believer in formal mentoring programs because, you know, you have to find the right fit for you. And sometimes you force somebody to be a mentor, they’re a horrible mentor. They don’t meet with you or whatever.
So, I am a believer in doing it informally, though. And I advise people on the business side to do the same thing. Which is: find somebody that you admire, and go say, ‘Can I take you to coffee? I’d love to your advice.’ Everybody is flattered when you say, ‘I’d love to get your advice.’
And look at the people you think, ‘God, I wanna be like that’ and get their two cents on how they got there. So I think that is a fair point and I would encourage people to find a mentor to give them advice on how to advance their career.
Bob Haiman (former president of Poynter): I’d like to go back to one of your comments about five minutes ago, when you said last year The Washington Post was a nonprofit operation, the problem is that wasn’t the plan.
One of the things that bothers me about all of these conversations, and I’ve been in many of them here at Poynter and elsewhere, is a lack of metrics. And I’m speaking specifically about time tables. People say, ‘Yes, the business model — the old business model’s broken, but we’re working on finding a new business model.’ And, ‘Yes, we’re losing a lot of print ads, but we’re getting a lot of online ads.’ The problem is for every dollar we lose in print ads we only get twelve cents on the online ads. And everybody says, ‘Yeah, but we’re gonna find this new model.’ We’re gonna find this new model and everything will come out fine at the other end.
How much time do you think, as the CEO of The Washington Post [Media], how much time do you think the Post and our industry has to find that new model that works?
Weymouth: Let me be clear. I made the joke about the nonprofit organization, but we’re not proud of it and we understand we need to be a profitable organization and we’re a public company. So, we run almost exclusively by metrics, both on the business side and even in the newsroom in terms of traffic and readership.
And we’re by no means waiting for some magic bullet to come around. That is not what we walk around saying. We understand we are a business, we’re running a business and we need to be doing it in a disciplined fashion. So, we have been aggressively cutting costs across the board. As well as focusing very hard on what we do that’s unique and good and making sure we can continue to do that.
We expect to turn the ship around as soon as possible. I can’t give you a specific date. But we have an incredible Board of Directors, including Warren Buffett as our lead director, who are very close to the business and the metrics. And I report out to them regularly as well as to Don Graham.
We’re fortunate to be part of a larger company that is profitable, thanks in large part to Kaplan and to our cable divisions. So, that has given us enough of a cushion so that we don’t have to eviscerate the journalism that we’re all so proud of and that we believe is our mission.
But we understand we’re running a business and I’m in the course of getting us back to profitability so we can continue to do that.
Haiman: How much time do you think the industry has to find this new business model that will work?
Weymouth: I’m not a believer that it’s some new business model we’re gonna find. I’m not a believer in a magic bullet. So I think it is in many cases about getting smaller. And cutting your cost structure. And then if some magic bullet comes along, fantastic. But we’re not waiting for that.
I can’t speak broadly for the industry, but we’re seeing a shakeout across the industry, which means many newspapers are in bankruptcy or reorganizing and I think the market forces are taking a toll. So, I think you’ll see it shakeout.
Karen Dunlap: You just mentioned a point that struck me. And that is that in the first quarter, the Washington Post company reported a profit, primarily from Kaplan and some of the other aspects, not the newspaper. Is there a fundamental problem in this country if more and more organizations are in a similar situation? That is, the news is not paid for through the news organization, but from other entities in the company.
Weymouth: It is my job to get us back to profitability. Kaplan and the company’s profitability just gives us a turnaround window that other newspaper entities didn’t have. So we’re lucky. But we have to get back on our feet. And we have to do it as fast as we can.
